16

ABEL HAD ANTICIPATED THAT EARTH FORCES WOULD soon investigate what had happened near Proteus. However, he’d failed to anticipate the scale of the investigation.

“Did they send every ship on Earth ever?” Virginia grumbles from her place at the helm. She keeps the Persephone close to Halimede, one of Neptune’s outermost moons. Her bright orange jumpsuit is the one flare of color in the otherwise darkened bridge.

“You’re exaggerating for humorous intent,” Abel says, “but this is a far larger search party than I would’ve anticipated, even considering the scale of the Remedy attack.”

To his surprise, Virginia laughs. “You still don’t get it, Abel. If Remedy had hit a Vagabond convoy, we’d see about one and a half scout ships out here taking readings. A luxury ship with Burton Mansfield aboard? Earth won’t stop until they get to the bottom of that, I promise you.”

“Your point is well taken. But this investigation is still limited.”

That earns him a puzzled frown from Virginia. “What do you mean?”

Abel expands the relevant area on the viewscreen and lights up the vectors he’s calculated as green shimmering lines against the starfield. “It’s very easy to tell which direction the Osiris flew in. Once they’re scanning that area, these ships should be able to pick up on the anomaly in the Kuiper Belt. If they were genuinely searching for the passengers, they’d be pursuing the Osiris, not merely gathering data on the Remedy assault.”

“Oh, man. You’re right. Why aren’t they doing that?” Virginia scowls as if the search parties were personally offending her.

“My guess is that they’ve received orders not to. Why they got those orders, and from whom, I can only guess.”

As a rule, Abel tries not to guess without good cause. Assumptions can be useful mental shortcuts, but they can also mask dangerous gaps in logic. Yet he finds it hard to dismiss his set of conclusions:

1. The anomaly they’ve detected must in fact be a Gate.
2. This Gate was built as a passageway to another habitable world, space station, or other place where large numbers of humans could live.
3. Whatever is hidden on the other side of that Gate is something only the powerful know about. Some of those powerful individuals were on the Osiris at the time of its disappearance—Mansfield’s presence alone proves that—but others were not. Some of those left behind must intend to follow the Osiris’s path.

Given the limited investigation, Abel must conclude that whatever fear these shadowy others have for the friends and family who went ahead isn’t as strong as their need to keep the secret.

Humans frequently (and inaccurately) speak of mechs as “cold-blooded,” unable to care. It seems to Abel that humans deserve the term far more. Mechs don’t have the ability to care; humans do, yet often choose not to care at all.

The Persephone remains where it is until the rotation of the planetary system gives the ship an obscured path to approach the hidden Gate. Once they’re within range of the distortion field, Virginia gasps. At first Abel is confused, because he sees nothing but dark, starry sky.

Then he remembers, Distortion fields are made to deceive electronic sensors. Not human eyesight.

Swiftly Abel limits his vision to wholly human frequencies to see what Virginia sees—and there it is.

“We have ourselves a Gate,” she says, “don’t we?”

“Yes.” But this is unlike any other Gate Abel has seen.

Most Gates are massive, built to be nearly indestructible, and they shine like the beacons of power they are. This Gate has been constructed to the same dimensions as any other, but were it not for the telltale shimmer across the center, it would be easy to believe it wasn’t completed. No outer plating is bolted to the inner mechanisms of the Gate for long-term protection. Instead, the panels and circuitry are exposed.

“They haven’t finished it yet,” Virginia suggests.

“Possibly. Or possibly this Gate isn’t meant to last for very long.” When she gives him an alarmed look, he adds, “In relative terms. It would remain operable for fifty to seventy-five years, but that’s still far less time than the other Gates will endure.”

“Why did they waste time building some half-assed Gate? They’re gonna wind up cut off from the rest of the Loop within a couple of generations.”

Abel nods. “I suspect that’s the idea.”

Virginia goes very still as she sees the truth Abel’s understood from his first look at this Gate: Whatever’s on the other side isn’t going to be a permanent addition to the Loop, one of the many possible homes for humanity in the future. Whatever world or station awaits them—it will be open for a select few, for a short time. Then it will be sealed off.

Something very precious lies on the other side of this Gate.

Several minutes pass before either of them speaks again. Once they’re within a few minutes’ travel of this ramshackle Gate, its messy workings beginning to fill the domed viewscreen, Abel says, “I have to make this trip, but you don’t.” Virginia’s argument on Cray was vigorous and heartfelt, but he wouldn’t blame her if she had reconsidered her decision after seeing the scale of the nearby investigation. “If you’d rather I dropped you off near one of the Saturn stations—”

“Forget it.” She shakes her head as if waking herself up and leans over her console with refreshed concentration. “Maybe some people could walk away not knowing what’s on the other side, but me? Virginia loves a mystery. I accept this about myself.”

Abel has learned not to be deceived by her jokes. “You’re a very loyal friend.”

“If you get mushy on me one more time, I swear to you, I’ll reprogram you in your sleep. You’ll be singing ‘God Save the Queen’ every hour on the hour.”

“You’re joking.” He waits for the response, then ventures, “…Aren’t you?”

“Push me and you’ll find out, Robot Boy.”

The hours of their trip are uneventful. Despite this Gate’s strange appearance, their voyage feels exactly the same as it would through any of the other Gates of the Loop. Neither Abel nor Virginia says a word until they finally spot the world on their sensors, and Virginia brings it up on the viewscreen.

“It’s beautiful,” she says as they take in the snowy surface of this unknown planet. Her tone is gentler than usual, softer. “It reminds me a lot of—when I was little, before Cray, sometimes we’d go up north and visit my grandparents way at the top of the Rockies. The snow would be a meter deep all around, as far as you could see.”

Abel has already worked out the planet’s orbit, its likely climate, how the sky would look from its surface. Its fifteen moons will make landing tricky, but the night should be illuminated by reflected light. “This is their summertime.”

“Really? How deep does the snow get in winter? Don’t answer that.”

“Its orbit and rotation suggest minimal variations in the seasons,” Abel adds. “I’d guess the average temperature fluctuates less than two degrees Celsius through the year.”

This is the chilliest of the habitable worlds yet discovered. Stronghold is cold, but still warmer than this—just as lower Scandinavia is warmer than northern Alaska on Earth. Stronghold’s arid surface makes snow extremely rare. Here, the atmosphere has enough humidity for blizzards and frosts. While the oceans he sees are smaller than those on Earth, they’re still vast enough to provide ample moisture for this world. Fish likely dwell within those oceans, and trees adapted to the chill will produce fruit even in a snowy springtime.

This splendor they see matters little, compared to what they’re not seeing. Abel says, “Can you detect the Osiris? I’m not picking it up on my sensors.”

“Mine neither—though we know it’s been here.” She hits a panel on her console that makes hazy lines of orange appear on the starfield in front of them, crossing the new planet’s white surface. The ionized trails mark the Osiris’s path. “Looks to me like they landed, terrorists and all.”

“Do you think we should scan the surface?” Abel is careful not to give Virginia orders. Unlike Harriet or Zayan, she is not his employee, and her ego is sturdy enough to sometimes outweigh her good heart. As the possessor of a healthy ego himself, Abel understands how inconvenient it can be.

Virginia responds to the suggestion as swiftly as she would’ve rejected a command. Within moments, the screen fills with the image of the Osiris… or what was once the Osiris, and is now only a wreck.

“Oh, crap,” Virginia says, even as she zooms in tighter on the image. “But—that looks survivable to me. Right?”

“I think so.”

Abel feels oddly bifurcated. Half of his brain performs the necessary calculations, projects a scenario in which the pilot of the Osiris failed to account for the gravitational pulls of so many different moons at once, and is content to have solved the logical puzzle. The other half feels as though he has been plunged underwater for an hour or two, as long as his cybernetic lungs can hold out, and his body is now screaming for air as desperately as any human’s.

Stay alive, Noemi, he thinks. Stay alive.

He doesn’t send the same message to Mansfield, but Directive One ensures he has to look for his creator, too.

“I’ll go down and search the surface. Look for Noemi, see if there are any survivors.” He doesn’t mention Mansfield by name.

“Whoa, whoa, hang on.” Virginia spins her chair around to face him. “What’s this talk about ‘I’? We’re a team, remember?”

“Any surviving members of Remedy or ship passengers will be desperate for an intact spacecraft. The Persephone should remain in orbit at all times, with a pilot aboard, to ensure it isn’t stolen.”

She crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Then why don’t you stay while I go?”

“Because I am physically stronger, better able to operate in conditions of extreme cold, more powerfully motivated, and have greater mental capacity than you.”

After a long, flat stare, Virginia says, “You really have zero concept of tact.”

“I understand it. But I prefer honesty.” He’d felt Virginia, who is well informed about cybernetics, would be able to accept these simple truths. Instead perhaps some nuance is called for. “You are of course extremely intelligent, given the limitations of a human brain.”

“Stick with the ego, buddy. You suck at tact.” Her mood has improved, but her position hasn’t. “What if you get yourself blown up? Going alone is dangerous, Abel!”

“This entire mission is dangerous. The relative increase in risk upon leaving the ship is irrelevant.”

At last Virginia sighs. “Fine.” As Abel gets to his feet, she adds, “But I’m monitoring you the whole way!”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

A few minutes later, the launching bay doors open and Abel flies Virginia’s corsair down toward the surface, spiraling in a long arc. The moons’ gravity wells tug at him like spiders crawling along their webs toward trapped prey, but he keeps the ship steady. Quickly the snowy planet becomes Abel’s entire sky.

The Osiris stands out even from a great distance, its gold-and-terra-cotta surface vivid against the pristine snow. Although it crashed into the surface, leaving a kilometer-long gash of broken trees and upturned soil, the ship’s structure appears largely intact. Abel readjusts his assessment of the crash. Assuming internal shock absorption and artificial gravity functions remained operational, most of the passengers are likely to have survived.

Noemi is alive. Probably she’s alive. And she’s strong enough, enterprising enough, to endure the aftermath of something like this—

He pushes away the thought. Even hope can’t be allowed to ruin his focus. For now, he has to determine how best to infiltrate the wreck of the Osiris.

Abel brings the corsair in closer, swooping low to the ground until he’s skimming just above the treetops and rolling hills. The conifers here grow dark blue needles instead of green, but otherwise they’re not so different from pine trees on Earth. In the near distance, a spectacular mountain range scrapes the pale sky. Soon, the sunset will filter between the peaks. A waterfall flows down one of the nearer mountains, its crest framed by a shell of ice the color of beach glass. The path of that river can be traced to a large lake that borders a broad plain, which seems likely to be the planned site of the first human settlement; a large structure shows up on his sensors, but absent any life signs, so it’s not important to investigate it at this time. While animal life is abundant in this planet’s oceans, relatively few species live on land, and the air is occupied primarily by pale gray clouds of what seems to be some kind of marsupial bat. Everything about this planet appears both beautiful and benign. Abel understands why people would hope to settle here, why they would consider living with the omnipresent cold a small price to pay.

What he doesn’t understand is how they overlooked every other danger sign. Because now that he’s in the atmosphere, able to take his own readings—

This cannot be accurate across the planet, he surmises. The toxicity rates must be specific to this locality, through a mechanism as yet undetermined. Otherwise humans would never have attempted to settle this world. No doubt he just flew over one rare, uninhabitable area, one that begs for further study.

Abel intends to study it, later. His focus must remain on the Osiris, and on what and who he may find within.

He lands the corsair roughly two kilometers from the crash, behind the crest of a hill. Although he’d like Noemi to know he’s coming for her, very few on board will welcome his presence. Remedy attackers won’t be pleased to see him; Burton Mansfield would be—only because he could then attempt to capture his prize creation. Abel must remain undetected as long as possible. He puts on his white hyperwarm parka, holsters his blaster at the belt, and sets out just as sunset begins to darken the sky.

The terrain’s rougher going in this area, with multiple boulders and dangerous scree hidden by the snow. The Osiris lies on the edge of a large plateau, near a sharp drop-off—and now that Abel can study the surface up close, he realizes deep crevasses may lurk underneath, hidden by the snow. So he slows his movements, examining every element of the path ahead.

The site crash is very near this planet’s equator, which means twilight falls swiftly. The sky above becomes luminous with five visible moons, casting enough reflected light to glitter on the snow. He extrapolates orbits from his observations in the Persephone and realizes no fewer than three moons will be visible at all times, every night of the year. Nighttime is rarely very dark here.

Convenient, perhaps, for future settlers—but for Abel, it only increases his chances of being detected.

He stays low, following the terrain. When he reaches the ship itself, he reassesses its condition. Equipment will have been badly damaged, or may be unusable simply because it’s affixed to what was once the floor and is now the ceiling. That will include hospital equipment, biobeds, anywhere an elderly man might be expected to rest.

Abel finds one air lock just above the line of the snow. He tries the automatic entry, but that’s broken. So he presses in with all his strength until he’s bent the seal itself, which allows him to painstakingly pull back the door. The effort is enough to tire even him. Once he’s cleared enough room for him to squeeze through, he does so, adjusting his vision to the darkness within. The floor beneath his feet slopes sharply to the right, and is curved like the ceiling it used to be. Fortunately his sense of balance is not so easily undermined.

No intruder alarms go off. As he heads for the inner door, he reasons that any alarms may no longer be operational. This area of the ship would’ve been near main engineering, which is now completely nonfunctional and therefore unlikely to be a priority for Remedy. He may yet get in undetected. The panel to open the door out of the air lock, inverted, is high enough that he has to jump for it, but at least it works. Once it’s open, stale air flows in and he eases out—

—to see a small huddle of people at the end of the corridor, each one armed and pointing straight at him.

Abel pulls back 0.17 seconds before the blaster bolts would’ve hit him. His weapon in his hand, he gauges whether to run out of the air lock and try a different entrance—but no, they’ll be on the lookout for him now. Instead he fires, not intending to kill anyone, but he aims close enough for them to know he could.

Someone shouts, “You heard Captain Fouda! All passengers are to surrender immediately!”

So these are Remedy members. “I’m not a passenger,” he calls back.

Another person yells, “You’re not one of us!”

“I never said I was. But I’m not a passenger either.”

A pause follows. Their confusion is rational enough, Abel decides. But how should he best present his case to them? If they’re warring against the passengers, as seems likely, they won’t think well of his coming here to save one.

A third voice calls, “Identify yourself!”

And somehow, this voice is one he knows.