23

SEVEN HOURS AGO, NOEMI HAD THOUGHT BEING stranded in a crashed, upside-down spaceship with a group of terrorists, their panicked hostages, and a potentially homicidal kid-turned-mech was one of the most dangerous situations she’d ever found herself in. Now she only wishes things could be that easy again.

Because—for the second time within ten days—she stands at the center of a plague.

She picks her way across the shimmering tiles on the ceiling/floor of what had been designed as a dining hall but has become a makeshift hospital. The emergency lighting at ankle level makes the tiles glitter and casts surreal shadows in the murky room. Nearly two dozen Remedy members lie on various cots and pallets, each of them pale, shaking, and feverish. Whatever they’re suffering from isn’t Cobweb, but it’s just as vicious. The sick people’s eyes are bloodshot, and they murmur as they weave in and out of consciousness. Sometimes they make perfect sense, and other times they rant about explosions, or mechs, or even dragons.

Is this what it’s like on Genesis at this moment? Or maybe Ephraim’s already led a Vagabond convoy to her world with lifesaving drugs.

Or maybe Earth’s already invaded, killing what few survivors remained, and is even now claiming Genesis as its own.

Riko’s steadier than most of the Remedy fighters, at least so far. She curls on the floor in a fetal position, arms wrapped around an engraved silver champagne chiller meant for finer things than serving as a vomit bucket. “I’m okay,” she murmurs unconvincingly. “I am. If I can just get some sleep—”

“That’s right.” Noemi strokes Riko’s short, spiky hair and notices how clammy her forehead has become. “You need rest. Close your eyes and try not to worry, all right?”

She’s not the most nurturing person, under most circumstances. Nursing the Gatsons had been awkward at best, her clumsy ministrations welcome only because nothing better could be had. Today—or tonight, whenever it is—she’s drawing on her memories of how Abel tended her when she got so desperately sick with Cobweb. It’s amazing how much more natural it feels, being caring and gentle, when she asks herself what Abel would do.

Maybe all this time she’d only needed someone to give her permission to be… soft. To not have her shields up all the time.

Abel himself is hard at work on the remnants of the bridge, bringing up what few ship functions can be restored, for what little time they can continue to operate. As more and more Remedy fighters fall ill, Captain Fouda grows more anxious. Maintaining control of the Osiris with only a fraction of his force will be difficult—or would be, if the passengers could strike. They must be as desperately ill as the Remedy fighters around Noemi. Fouda wants to automate as many force fields and defense systems as possible, so Abel’s devoting his attention to bringing up what little additional power the ship still has.

Both Noemi and Abel need to play by Remedy’s rules for a while. When they can work out that long-term strategy Abel mentioned, they’ll figure out how to escape from this situation.

As if he’s sensed Noemi thinking about him, Captain Fouda strides through the room, ignoring the patients and medicines lying around, his boots crunching on the fragile peacock-blue tiles underneath. He doesn’t step on anyone who’s sick, though he’s so careless that’s probably just luck. “No one’s up yet?” he demands, apparently to everyone at once. “Not one person has gotten better?” He gets louder with every word. Before long, he’ll be shouting, waking up all the patients and ensuring they remain sick even longer.

So Noemi goes to him, gesturing toward where some of the sicker ones lie. “Whatever this is, it’s serious. Yelling at them isn’t going to help. These people are going to need care for at least a day or two.” Privately she thinks it might be much longer; for a few, fevers have spiked high enough to cause convulsions.

Fouda scowls and steps closer to her. “That’s time we don’t have. We’re down too many operatives as it is.” Then he turns away to stalk through the ad hoc sick bay, as though he could heal these people through his anger alone. Noemi begins to turn away, then catches sight of something on the back of his neck, just above his collar. Straightening, she squints to make it out.

The pale lines on his skin are too random for a tattoo; they match the marks on the side of his face, so maybe that’s more battle scarring. Yet the marks are familiar, too, in a way she didn’t spot before….

They look a lot like the pale white lines on her shoulder, the ones that won’t go away—her scars from Cobweb. He suffered from it, too; he survived, like her.

Probably their shared experience should make her feel more compassionate toward him. Instead she only wonders how anybody could have been that sick, felt that much pain, and not be able to summon any concern for others.

The same way you rationalize setting off a bomb in the middle of a music festival, she thinks. You stop thinking of other people as human.

It’s a couple of hours more before Fouda releases Abel from duty. Noemi could time it to the minute, because she knows Abel has come to her as fast as he could. “You’re feeling well?” He reaches for her face, then hesitates; she finds herself wishing he’d come those few inches closer, so they’d have touched.

“I’m fine. I mean, I’m exhausted and I’m hungry and I’d give my left arm to take a shower, but I’m not sick.”

He doesn’t look as relieved as she thought he would. Instead he glances around the sick bay, assessing each patient in turn. “You should be sick.”

“Huh?”

“On landing approach to Haven, I measured high levels of toxicity in the air. They were incompatible with human life—really, with any life we know of. At first I thought it might be unique to that location, but my more recent scans suggest a far broader distribution. It’s possible the entire planet is toxic to human life.”

“But the trees—and there must be animals—”

“They would’ve evolved to survive in these conditions,” Abel says. “Humans have not.”

None of this makes any sense to Noemi. “But they set up this huge expedition here! The richest and most powerful people in the galaxy—they went to all the trouble of building a Winter Castle here and stocking it with servant mechs. There’s no way they would’ve done that if they knew this planet was sick, and there’s no way they didn’t scan this world top to bottom before any of this began. The Osiris would never have been built in the first place.”

Abel takes Noemi’s wrist in his hand, his thumb above the blue lines of her veins. “Your pulse is normal. You appear to be breathing easily—”

“I told you, I’m fine.”

“You can’t be,” he says flatly. “Before, I thought the ship’s air filtration systems must be operating at enough efficiency to keep the humans on board alive. Obviously that isn’t true. Every person on this ship will fall ill and die unless they’re removed in time.”

“If I were going to be sick, I would know by now. Riko started feeling bad more than a day ago.”

He frowns. “The passengers haven’t asked for help. Nor did Gillian show any signs of illness when Fa—when we spoke to her last.”

Is Delphine Ondimba sick like this right now? She’s the one passenger Noemi liked, the only one worth worrying about. “It might only have been setting in. There’s no way almost everybody in Remedy would come down with this while every single passenger on the Osiris would stay well.”

Abel ventures, “Possibly the better health care the passengers would’ve received explains it. They’ve always eaten better food, had opportunities for optimized exercise without being subjected to hard labor—much as you grew up in a far healthier environment on Genesis.”

Briefly Noemi recalls Ephraim Dunaway explaining that he knew she was “too healthy” to be from anywhere but Genesis. If only they had a doctor like Ephraim here. “It’s not just me, though. Did you notice that Captain Fouda’s fine, too? So are a handful of the other Remedy fighters.”

“It’s mysterious,” Abel admits. She knows he hates confessing he doesn’t know something nearly as much as a cat hates getting wet. It would be funny if the situation weren’t so desperate. “Still, I’d like to further analyze the possibility that preexisting health makes a difference. Remember how your physical condition helped you when you had Cobweb.”

Cobweb. Noemi feels the white lines on her shoulder prickle, and thinks of the scars along the side of Fouda’s face. “Oh, my God.”

“What?” Abel takes hold of her shoulders. “Are you dizzy? Nauseated?”

“I’m one hundred percent okay,” she says. “And I think maybe I know the reason why.”

Reaching the ship’s real sick bay takes some effort. It’s not that far away, but the doors don’t reach all the way to the old ceiling, now the floor, so Abel has to jump for it and help Noemi over. Then the consoles and biobeds are suspended so far overhead that she wonders why they bothered coming here when the equipment is out of reach.

But Abel rigs up an emergency platform and is able to work on the consoles just as efficiently when they’re upside down. Noemi remains at the base of the platform to steady it while he works. Her head is at the level of his calf. Greenish light from the screen illuminates his face as he says, “The database has files about Cobweb, but they’re all locked. Only Burton Mansfield and Gillian Shearer are cleared to access them.”

Good luck getting Gillian to help them out. Noemi groans and leans her head against Abel’s leg. “So much for that.”

“Actually, I suspect they’re locked only to a basic DNA scan. If so, we’re in luck.” Abel holds his hand up to a soft-scanner that reads tissue. In the dim green glow, Noemi can see dark matter crusted under his nails—his own blood. She’ll never forget watching Abel literally tear his own body apart only to see his unworthy creator one more time.

The scanner blinks and whirs, and data begins to rapidly unfurl on the screen. She can’t read it at this distance, at least not upside down, but she begins to smile. “You got through, didn’t you?”

“As far as this ship knows, I am Mansfield.” He pulls back in surprise.

“What? What is it?”

Slowly Abel says, “They’ve all had Cobweb.”

“Huh?”

“Every registered passenger aboard this ship was infected with a weakened form of the Cobweb virus before departure. This was done under clinical supervision, with antiviral treatment being administered almost immediately. Under such conditions, Cobweb would virtually never be fatal.”

Everything begins clicking together. “We knew Cobweb was man-made,” Noemi says. “We knew they made it for some purpose, but we couldn’t guess what it was.”

“We still lack proof,” Abel says, “but I believe we both share the same theory.”

Whatever Earth scientists were trying to do, they screwed up. If it’s a weapon, it escaped into their own population before they were able to use it against yours, said Ephraim Dunaway months ago on Stronghold, when he explained what little Remedy knew about the Cobweb virus at that time. If word got out that this disease was created by Earth, we’d have mass rioting on every world of the Loop.

“Cobweb wasn’t designed to hurt people,” she says. “It must’ve been designed to save them.”

Abel nods. “Haven must have been found several decades ago. Earth’s government would’ve realized it would be the perfect replacement for Genesis, if only for the few environmental factors that kept it from being safe for human beings. So they attempted to bioengineer a virus that would rewrite human DNA, only enough for them to endure the conditions here. In that regard, Cobweb does exactly what its creators hoped. But the virus is more dangerous to human life than they knew.”

“A lot of people who catch Cobweb get so sick they die.” Noemi shakes her head in wonder. “But the ones who survive… they inherit an entire world.”

“I put the probability of this hypothesis being correct at approximately 92.6 percent.” Abel hops down from the platform to her side, so lightly and easily that she’s reminded again—he’s not quite human. “There are medicines for Cobweb in storage on the ship, including weaker forms of the virus that might operate as inoculations—”

“Thank God,” Noemi says. She has serious problems with Remedy’s radical wing, but she can’t bear to watch people needlessly suffer and die. “We can help them.”

But Abel shakes his head. “The materials aren’t stored in the sick bay. They were considered ‘high risk’ and are kept in the same area as the tanks for growing mechs. That’s territory currently held by the passengers.”

That was the first place they’d run to, when Noemi told them they needed to control “valuable resources” on the ship. I believed Gillian was being so selfish, leading us there, Noemi thinks. But she knew exactly what she was doing. She was the ruthless soldier at war. I was the one in over my head.

“If Earth made Cobweb a virus,” she says slowly, “one that spread organically, with a high level of contagion, so absolutely everyone would catch it—they didn’t originally intend to hide Haven. They meant to share it with the galaxy.”

Abel considers this, then nods. “That also seems likely. Earth’s government still chose to conceal Haven in the end, but it seems likely they did so primarily to cover up the truth about Cobweb.”

“That’s not a good enough reason. Not to deny this to humanity—to resume the Liberty War—” Noemi gasps. “That’s why they did it, isn’t it? Why they came back decades after we thought they’d let us go? They ended the war when Haven was found. They started it again when they realized they could never reveal the truth about this planet.”

“I can only put that at a 71.8 percent probability,” Abel says gravely.

“You mean—probably. Not certainly, but probably.”

He nods.

Noemi feels nauseated, not from illness but from the knowledge that her world could’ve been saved so easily—but someone, somewhere, decided they had too much to hide.

She expects returning to the makeshift sick bay to be more difficult, now that she knows these people could so easily have been treated. They’ll have to break this news to Fouda, who will of course want to attack the passengers immediately—a conflict Noemi doesn’t want any part of any longer. Even less does she want to be surrounded by suffering people she can’t save; after Genesis and now this, she feels like some mythological bringer of death.

But the worst part of her return is when she sees how much worse Riko is.

“Riko?” She hurries to Riko’s bedside, Abel beside her. Riko looks so ragged, so miserable, that Noemi can hardly connect her to the energetic, sarong-clad woman they met on Kismet’s moon. Even when Riko was in prison on Earth, her strength shone through. Now she looks like her own ghost. “Hang on, okay? We might be able to help you.”

“Doubt it,” Riko rasps.

“Shhh. Save your strength.” Noemi looks around for something, anything that might help, and Abel hands her a cool, damp washrag someone must have prepared. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing, so she lays it across Riko’s forehead. Riko’s skin is so hot it nearly burns.

“Tell me one thing,” Riko whispers. Every word costs her. Every movement. Yet she manages to clasp Noemi’s wrist. “You people—on Genesis—you believe in gods, don’t you?”

“We believe—” Noemi catches herself before launching into a detailed explanation of the many various faiths on Genesis. “Well, we believe.”

“Before—I thought I’d see people living free—thought I’d know then it was all worth it.” The doubts Riko never hinted at before now haunt her eyes. “But I’m not going to see that. I’ll never really know.”

Noemi opens her mouth to protest that Riko will be okay, but Abel gives her a look that silences her words. Whatever treatment is out there, they’re not going to retrieve it in time.

Riko continues, “What if I was wrong the whole while? What if there’s no place for us to go? Was it all for nothing?”

Abel says, “You acted on your beliefs, intending to help others. That has worth.” He and Noemi share a glance. She knows he doesn’t agree with Remedy’s terrorist actions any more than she does. But there’s no point in punishing this woman on her deathbed.

Noemi remembers Captain Baz’s words to her, more meaningful than ever before. “I think it matters what we fight for. What we choose to die for.”

Riko hears in those words whatever she needed to hear. She very nearly smiles. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Noemi brushes a few strands of sweaty hair off Riko’s forehead, then takes her hand.

Riko’s grip tightens around hers at first, but slowly, gradually goes slack. Her breathing slows down. Suddenly the image of Esther’s final moments fills Noemi’s mind, tightening her throat. This is what death looks like.

The doctors always say hearing is the last sense to go. She leans close to Riko’s ear. “It’s all right. We’re here with you. It’s okay.” Which is utterly meaningless, but it’s all she can come up with.

Somehow she must have said the right thing again, because Riko relaxes, exhales in a long, unmistakable rattle, and—

“She’s dead,” Noemi whispers as she turns to Abel. “Isn’t she?”

“The line between life and death is somewhat arbitrary.” Only Abel could say this and sound compassionate. “Riko’s heart and lungs have ceased to function, but while her brain no longer supports consciousness, it continues sending signals. In its last moments, her body was flooded with endorphins, with every possible emergency boost of strength or will. Her brain will be processing these as pure euphoria, producing the visions reported by so many brought back from clinical death.”

“That’s what Earth thinks.” She wipes at her eyes. “On Genesis we see it differently.”

Apparently Abel knows better than to argue the existence of heaven with her here and now. “It’s interesting to conjecture.”

Although Noemi believes in the afterlife, she isn’t sure exactly what kind of reckoning awaits on the other side. She only knows Riko kneels before it now. A power greater than Noemi will decide whether punishment or mercy is called for. So it’s okay to mourn what could’ve been.

If Earth had opened Haven to everyone, Noemi thinks, there wouldn’t be such a thing as Remedy. Maybe Riko would’ve been a settler here, working hard to set up the first cities of a brand-new world.

So many lives could’ve been so much better if Earth had only taken responsibility.

The comms—recently restored by Abel—crackle with sound. Gillian Shearer’s voice comes through: “If our calculations are correct, by now the members of Remedy have learned exactly why this world belongs to us, and not to them. You can’t live in this environment—not without the medical treatment we control.”

Noemi and Abel look at each other. We were right, she thinks.

Gillian says, “We’re willing to trade that medical treatment. You’ll get as much as you need. You simply have to pay for it first.”

Noemi instantly realizes what comes next. Dread hollows her out, and her breath catches in her throat.

With satisfaction, Gillian concludes, “Bring us the mech named Abel, alive.”