22

ABEL OFTEN EXPERIENCES THE SAME PHYSIOLOGICAL responses to emotions that humans do, although his design was intended to make those emotions slightly muted. This renders him more efficient and effective—that’s the rationale Mansfield gave, long ago. So your body won’t be shackled to your mind.

In this, at least, Mansfield must have been correct. Because hearing the fear in Gillian’s voice, knowing that his creator is dying not in the abstract future, but at this very moment—it wrenches him apart. If he were human, surely this would be unbearable. That, or Mansfield was wrong, and Abel is feeling every bit as much emotion as a human would. His airways are partly constricted; sounds seem to be coming from far away. His hairs stand on end as though it were his life in danger rather than Mansfield’s. Every physical reaction tells Abel to act immediately or suffer forever.

He remains still.

“Abel?” The desperation in Gillian’s voice echoes within him. “Are you there? Can’t you hear me?”

“Yes, Gillian.” The words come out at a lower volume than he would’ve expected. It’s as if he’s initiated a partial shutdown to conserve energy. He turns to Fouda and says, “This conversation requires a private channel. I should be able to transfer this to the captain’s antechamber, with your permission of course.”

From his place in his crooked, battered, repositioned captain’s chair, Fouda tries to look stern—but only for a moment. Something in Abel’s face, or in Gillian’s voice, has made an impression where all their earlier words did not. “All right, then.” Fouda’s expression turns unreadable as he motions toward the antechamber. “Go.”

Gillian, who must have heard the exchange, says nothing. Yet the sound of her shallow, panicked breathing comes through the comms regardless.

As Abel hastens into the antechamber, Noemi follows him. No doubt she realized he would want her close. He’s wanted to be so deeply understood again, but his pleasure in it is distant, something he knows rather than feels. As he patches the comms through to this small, darker room, she stoops down, searching through the various shards of debris. It is a strange way of giving him privacy, he thinks, but is grateful for her intention.

All of this he senses at a remove. Directive One seems far away—grief for his father eclipsing even the programming meant to ensure Abel would never outlive him.

The silence has gone on too long for Gillian. “Abel? Can you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Then please, come to us.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“You have to,” Gillian insists. “This is about more than one man’s life. This is about the next step in human and mech evolution. This is about immortality itself. Don’t you see that?”

“I do now.” Everything’s very clear to him, in a way it never was before. Perhaps extreme emotional responses serve a mental purpose after all: They clarify thought and intention. Behind him, he hears Noemi breathe out sharply, perhaps in frustration with Gillian’s grandiosity, but she doesn’t interrupt.

“Abel?” Mansfield’s wheezing voice comes through the speaker, so feeble it shatters something within Abel, something intangible but very real. “My boy—”

He cannot bear hearing such pain and not seeing his creator. He will not.

Main communications, like almost every other shipwide system, has been down since the crash. Most components will have survived with only minimal damage; however, power has been diverted to emergency light and temperature systems. All Abel has to do to restore visual communications is provide an alternate energy source. He holds up one hand and then runs a finger along one of the hidden seams in his synthetic skin; it breaks and bleeds, exposing raw mechanics. The pain is irrelevant. From within the skeletal structure of his wrist he removes a small auxiliary power module, a backup he’s never had to call on.

With his red, slippery fingers, Abel shoves the small power module into the appropriate slot on the comm panel. Instantly the holoscreen begins to fuzz and glow. He leans into its speaker and says the name for Burton Mansfield he’s tried so hard to forget, but can’t: “Father.”

The screen shimmers into the image of a sickroom—not in a hospital with helpful Tares and a biobed, with everything optimized for patient comfort, but a pitiful pile of blankets on the floor. Gillian Shearer kneels beside the bed, surrounded by equipment Abel remembers from his earliest days of wakefulness in the lab. And there, lying down, is what remains of Burton Mansfield. It’s not all of him any longer; even though Mansfield breathes and moves, something essential has already broken the ties that held it in place.

Gillian tries to smile, a crooked parody of the genuine thing. “You see now, don’t you? You understand what has to be done?”

“Better than you do,” Abel replies.

“You have to come to him! You have to. Even if you push back on Directive One to save others—you can’t do it for yourself alone.” Gillian’s lower lip trembles, and a memory from more than thirty years ago replaces real-time visual input: Her holding up her tiny hand for him to bandage after a fight at school. She had trusted him completely back then. He had not yet matured enough to question whether he could trust her in return.

Abel says, “It appears that I can.”

The fragility of Gillian’s expression shifts into something stronger and darker. “I didn’t want to do this. Not ever, really—it’s beneath us—but my father’s work must continue.” She holds up her forearm. Despite her disheveled clothing and dirty hair, she’s still wearing an elaborate jeweled bracelet. This seems ludicrous to Abel until he magnifies his vision and realizes the mechanism it contains. “I still have the power to kill Noemi Vidal.”

“No,” Noemi gasps—not in horror, but in pain. “Not anymore.”

He turns to see her standing 1.4 meters behind him, clutching her blood-streaked arm. At her feet lies the ragged bit of metal she used to slice into her own flesh; in her fingers is a pea-sized ampule, ringed in almost microscopic machinery, gleaming wetly. The self-control required to keep from crying out during such pain—it is no less bravery than he’d expect from Noemi but it astonishes him regardless. They’re each bleeding from their left arm, each wounded in almost exactly the same place.

These wounds are the price of their freedom from Mansfield, forever.

Gillian’s face goes pale, and she lets her arm drop. She acknowledges neither the threat she made nor Noemi’s liberating herself from it. “You have to do this,” Gillian insists. “If you didn’t, why would you even be here? You can’t have done it only for the girl. Not this. You crossed an entire galaxy, knowing that your life would be forfeit when you were found! You would never have searched for the Osiris and Haven, not if you didn’t understand your destiny. Only Directive One could make you do that.”

“I believed so, too,” Abel says, “until just now. Yes, I came here for more than Noemi. I had to know what had happened to Father. I couldn’t go on without knowing. Naturally I assumed Directive One helped to lead me here. But that was an incorrect assumption.”

Abel isn’t used to learning new truths without evidence; he can’t even say when this truth first became clear to him. He’s only aware that he knows it as surely as he knows anything else in his experience or memory banks.

Mansfield’s breath catches in his throat. “Abel?”

“I’m here, Father,” Abel says. “Not because of Directive One. I was led here by the part of me that remembered when you showed me Casablanca for the first time, and explained Captain Renault’s jokes. When you took me out into the garden to trace the constellations. And how happy you were the first time I told you I could dream. Noemi calls this my soul. Whatever it is, it’s the part of me that proved you a genius—the part that proved you could create artificial intelligence that was the equal of any human. Yet it’s the part of me you have no use for.”

Mansfield opens his mouth to reply, but he can’t. His breathing has become shallow and erratic. It takes all of Abel’s willpower not to magnify the section of the holoscreen where he might read the small machines that measure pulse and respiration. Such details would confirm nothing Abel doesn’t already know.

This is the hour of Burton Mansfield’s death. Very nearly the minute.

Gillian has begun to weep. Although Abel expects her to keep pleading for their father’s life, she instead starts working with some of the equipment piled near. One unfamiliar element draws his eye—a small, glowing octahedron in the shape of a diamond. With a trembling hand, Gillian inserts it into the machine connected to her father by the diodes stuck to his forehead.

Abel knows what this means, but there’s no point in acknowledging it. He has very little time to speak, and must say the most important thing first. “I love you, Father. You don’t love me, which seems as though it should change my own feelings, but it doesn’t. I love you anyway.” His eyes blur. This is only the second time Abel has ever cried. “I can’t help it.”

Noemi leans her head against his back. It comforts him as much as anything could in this moment. That’s not much.

Mansfield coughs. Maybe he’s trying to speak; maybe it’s a spasm, no more. But even that minor exertion is too much. A deep rattle in his chest fills Abel with dread; he’s never heard that sound before but he knows what it means. Gillian takes her father’s hand, but Mansfield doesn’t look at her. His rheumy eyes stare at the screen. At Abel. He’s the one Mansfield wants with him, not the weeping daughter by his side.

This is what greed does to humans, Abel thinks. It makes them ignore the love they have in favor of what they can never attain.

The rattle chokes off. Mansfield exhales, and doesn’t breathe in again. His wide-open eyes are no longer looking at Abel or at anything. Although there is no rational reason for it, his body appears smaller and more frail.

Burton Mansfield is dead.

With her one uninjured arm, Noemi hugs Abel tightly from behind. He covers her hand with his, taking what comfort he can from her touch. But he can only stare at the father who never loved him, unable to turn to the girl who does.

He’d always thought that Mansfield’s death would liberate him from Directive One and so would feel like being set free. It doesn’t feel like that at all. What Abel felt—and feels—for his father will always matter. That’s a burden he’ll carry as long as he exists.

Gillian doesn’t break down in tears. Instead she lifts the small diamond-shaped data solid in her palms, cradling it reverently in front of her chest. It emits a soft white glow that lights her face from below, which makes her look almost like another person. “He’s not gone,” she says thickly. “I’ve saved him here. And I will save him completely. Soon.” She casts her blue gaze up at Abel, newly intense in both grief and fury.

“You can’t do that without capturing me,” Abel says. His voice sounds almost normal, which surprises him. It seems as though he ought to have been changed in some fundamental way, though of course there’s no logical reason for this. “And you are in no position to capture me.”

“I will be.” Gillian doesn’t say it in defiance. She’s certain. She shouldn’t be. There is more to her threat, an element he doesn’t understand but must discover. “I’ve already brought a soul over once. I can do it again.”

Noemi steps from behind Abel. “Simon’s not—I’m sorry, Gillian. I did look for him. I kept our bargain. But when we found him, he—he’s turned angry, and strange—”

“If you want me to work with Simon,” Abel interjects, “I will.” When Noemi glances over at him in evident dismay, he decides they must discuss this again in the near future. “Whatever difficulties you’ve faced in your son’s transfer, I should be able to put them right.”

Gillian shakes her head. “I don’t need your pity, Abel. I need you. And within one more Haven day, I’ll have you.”

The holoscreen blinks out, and the antechamber goes dark.

In the wake of his creator’s death he should feel safer than he has in a long time. He doesn’t. Instead he feels damaged in a way he doesn’t know how to repair. Mansfield might’ve known how to fix it, but Abel can no longer ask him.

The first repair he conducts is Noemi’s arm; she, in turn, helps reseal his synthetic skin. Together they wipe away their blood as they sit in a small passageway off the bridge, one that Remedy is using as a kind of crew quarters. Several of their fighters are resting there, apparently exhausted from the days of this siege. Noemi must be tired, too, but she’s more worried about Abel than about herself, which seems wrong to him. She is the priority.

“Are you okay?” she murmurs as they sit on the floor, side by side, her hand wrapped around his. The white bandages around her arm contrast sharply with the relative darkness around them.

“I can continue to function.”

“That’s not the same as okay.”

Abel leans his head against her shoulder. “No. But it will do.” He’s been sad before, but has never been comforted like this. Simply being cared for has a kind of emotional power he’d never suspected. “We should discuss our long-term strategy.”

Her hand gently squeezes his, demonstrating that she knows he needs this as both a plan and a distraction. “First we need a short-term strategy.”

“This is an excellent point.”

“If Gillian Shearer’s coming after you…” Her voice trails off and she shakes her head. “They don’t have the firepower or the strategy to take down Remedy, and they act like they’re happy to wait for servant mechs to come and find them someday, which would’ve happened by now if it were happening at all. So you’re safe.”

“They have an advantage we haven’t determined yet. Or Gillian believes that they do. Even if she’s in error, soon the passengers will act. They’ll try to retake the ship in an attempt to recapture me.”

She hesitates. “What you said about Simon—you meant that?”

“Of course. I have to help him if I can.”

“Are you sure you can?” Noemi bites her lower lip, then blurts out, “I know what he means to you, Abel. He’s closer to being like you than anything or anyone else ever has been. But… you have to have seen he’s not right.”

“I see that he’s new, and the product of an untried process. A child’s consciousness was a poor choice for an initial transfer, particularly under such chaotic conditions. But he represents a step forward in mech evolution. He’s the first Inheritor.” When Noemi frowns, he explains, “So Gillian called them. Mechs with greater organic components—and, it would seem, the capacity to house a soul.”

Noemi must have witnessed enough to realize some of the rest for herself. “From their base here, they were going to make all these mechs—mechs they could transfer human souls into—” Anger flickers across her face. “He would’ve made more mechs with souls. It wasn’t enough that he had to imprison you in a mech’s body forever. He wanted to do it over and over again—thousands, millions of times—”

“I don’t understand,” Abel says. “Imprison me?”

“It was wrong of Mansfield to give you a human soul and a mech body, with programming that forced you to obey him.”

“You mentioned this once, but I didn’t realize you meant it so literally.” The strangeness of this strikes him; it’s as though she’s been speaking another language entirely, one he failed to translate in time. “Noemi—yes, I’m angry at Mansfield for some of his programming. But how can I be angry that he created me? He didn’t imprison my soul. He brought it into being.”

“But”—she struggles for words, and finds the wrong ones—“it just seems so unfair, that you have to live like this.”

“What other way could I live? Mansfield could hardly have given me a choice of whether to be mech or human. My nature combines elements of both. Being a mech is part of my soul, of who I am. I don’t want to change it. Do you think I should want to?”

“You mean you don’t want to be human?”

“What would be the point of wishing for the impossible? Besides, I’m faster than humans. Smarter. More durable. I make use of all my capacities and even enjoy them. Why would I want to reject them?”

“That’s not what I meant,” she protests. “I only know Mansfield shouldn’t have done that to you.”

“He shouldn’t have made me in the first place?”

“Stop twisting my words around!”

“I’m not.” Abel looks at her the way he did the first day they met, when they were still enemies bound together only by her desperate need and a quirk in his programming. She hated him then. He didn’t like her either. “You pity me, simply for being. You saved me and spared me because you recognized the value of my soul, but you still don’t believe my life is as valid as yours.”

“That’s not true.” She puts her hands on either side of his face. Her skin is rough and abraded, her nails broken down. Blood from her self-inflicted injury still mars her fingernails. The contrast between the proof of her struggle on this ship and the tenderness in her eyes takes the heat from his anger. He’s acutely aware of the presence of at least a dozen Remedy fighters sleeping nearby; surely they should be out behaving like soldiers, not present for a moment this intimate between him and Noemi. “Abel, you’ve talked about how alone you are. How you don’t have anyone else in the galaxy like you. Was it right of Mansfield to do that to you?”

“No. But if Simon can be saved—if the organic mechs can prove sophisticated enough to possess souls—I won’t be alone for long.”

Noemi winces, as if in pain. “Will you just ask yourself if maybe you want this too much?”

Will you question your own prejudices, Noemi? Can you not try to see him as a little boy in need of help? The words are there, waiting to be spoken, but Abel doesn’t say them. He doesn’t want to argue with Noemi—not when they’re in such danger, and he can’t blame her for being afraid. The pain of Mansfield’s death is fresh for him, startlingly powerful, with dimensions Abel knows he’s only begun to map. Noemi’s presence is his only comfort. He doesn’t want to push her away, not ever but especially not now.

But she is so horribly wrong.

Footsteps in the hallway make them both turn toward the sound. Noemi lowers her hands from Abel’s face as two Remedy members enter on either side of Riko, supporting her on each arm. She looks even paler than before and is hardly able to walk.

“What’s going on?” Noemi goes to Riko’s side.

One of the Remedy soldiers says, “Another sick one.” He rubs his forehead, telegraphing his own discomfort. “Somebody must’ve caught the flu before we started on this mission. Just our luck.”

Abel turns back to the sleeping Remedy soldiers behind him, reexamining them with his full attention. If he’s estimated the size of the Remedy attack force correctly, this is a far higher percentage of fighters than would normally be allowed to take simultaneous rest breaks. When he attunes his hearing to check their breathing, many of them have elevated respiration rates; their bodies are not efficiently processing oxygen.

He remembers the readings he took on his flight in. The toxicity levels in that one sector weren’t compatible with human life. No person exposed to that for more than a brief time would be able to continue functioning. Death would follow within mere days—if not hours.

Swiftly he goes to the nearest console and activates as much of the Osiris’s sensor array as still functions. When he does a sweep, he realizes that the area he flew over wasn’t an aberration. Those toxicity levels stretch out over an enormous area, possibly even planetwide.

That means every human being on this ship is about to die. The Remedy fighters, the passengers—and Noemi.