36

HEARING RETURNS TO ABEL FIRST. HE PROCESSES THE input automatically, then consciously: It is the sound of a man crying.

Next he regains proprioception, the awareness of his own limbs and physical body. Then touch, which reveals that he’s lying on a flat, hard surface. Smell he finds with his next inhalation—

—and his receptors identify the scent of blood.

Abel opens his eyes and snaps back to full consciousness. He sits up quickly to take stock of his new situation and then realizes, no, he can’t be conscious yet. What he sees can only be a nightmare; therefore he is still asleep. But most dreams dissolve upon recognition, nightmares especially, and Abel’s still here, on a table, looking down at Noemi lying on the floor, unconscious or…

He looks toward the sound of weeping and sees Darius Akide on his knees, hands pressed together in the traditional shape of prayer. “Forgive me, Lord. Forgive your unworthy servant.”

On the floor next to Akide lies a blaster. The scent of ozone tangles with that of blood in the air.

Abel stares again at Noemi and sees the scorch marks on her exosuit. The faint spattering of blood around her on the floor from the few capillaries not instantly cauterized by a blaster wound. And the very slight rise and fall of her breath, which tells him that as seriously hurt as she is, she’s still alive.

This is no dream. This is reality, and he still has a chance to shape it.

He leaps from the table, landing between Akide and Noemi. Akide stares up in astonishment; apparently he didn’t know how long the stunner’s effects would last. Abel says nothing, just seizes Akide’s head in one hand and his throat in the other, then snaps them in opposite directions. His sharp hearing picks up the faint pop of the spine before the corpse drops to the ground.

There is deep inner programming meant to keep non-warrior mechs from hurting human beings, and that programming now throbs within Abel, one brief pulse of pain, and then it’s forgotten. Maybe it will trouble him later. Nothing matters at this moment except for Noemi.

He kneels beside her and brushes his fingers along her cheek. “Can you hear me?” Being stunned is a poor analogue of death, but he knows that in both cases, hearing is the last sense to go.

Noemi’s eyes flutter open. Abel rolls her into his arms, cradling her shoulders in the crook of one elbow. Her pupils are slightly dilated and both her pulse and respiration are dangerously low. She opens her mouth, closes it again, then manages to whisper, “Abel?”

“Yes. I’m here. I’m going to take care of you.”

With that he pulls her into his arms and dashes to the nearest biobed. He’s able to keep her steady in his embrace, without a single jolt to hurt her more, and once he’s reached his destination he lays her gently on one of the biobeds. Immediately readings light up on the monitors, each one of them more dire than the last.

Abel knows how a biobed functions. These readings are consistent with the injury Noemi has received. Yet he cannot believe them. Never before has he understood the human emotional response called “denial.”

“Where’s Akide?” she murmurs.

Hopefully in hell, Abel thinks, but he says only, “He’s not a danger anymore.”

“…Did he hurt you…?”

How can she worry about him while she lies on the biobed with a burned-out crater in her chest? “No. I’m all right, Noemi, I’m fine, and I’m going to make you well.”

“Liar,” she says softly, and somehow it sounds like the kindest name she’s ever called him.

The heart remains intact, he thinks, looking up at the readings. The lungs are badly compromised, significantly past recommended regeneration limits but not absolutely beyond the range of possibility. Liver, spleen, and gallbladder destroyed, but only the liver is critical and could in time be regenerated.

Time. He needs time to save her, and all his intelligence and ability can’t give it to him.

“It’s starting,” she murmurs. “You can feel it a little… like your body isn’t yours really….”

“Try to remain conscious.” Why does he feel such a strong need to say this to her when he knows it’s beyond her power to obey? He wants to believe it’s up to her. He hates even the idea of heaven, because if she has faith in some better place she’ll want to go there. “Stay with me.”

“Wish I could.” Noemi’s eyes close for a moment; when she opens them again, it’s obvious she’s fighting for even that. “…I’m going to find Esther’s star.”

“Noemi—”

“Come to me there someday,” she whispers. “A long time from now.”

Then her head leans to one side as her eyes fall shut again.

Abel stares up at the biobed monitor. Her heart’s still beating; her shallow lungs are processing what oxygen they can. But she’s no longer conscious, and if this were any other human patient, he would judge it unlikely that she’d ever wake again.

This isn’t any other patient. This is Noemi, and he will not endure this.

She deserves her life. He’s going to give it to her.

Swiftly he gathers her back into his arms and crosses the sick bay in three long strides, which take him to the cryosleep pods. He hits the activator with his elbow. One of the pods slides from its place on the wall onto the floor; its translucent panels fold open like the petals of a flower. Abel settles Noemi onto the pale green interior, and the soft, elastic substance gives slightly under her weight.

Maximum skin contact is recommended for optimal results. The words from the cryosleep training manual are right there in his memory bank; they’ve waited there all these years for the moment when he’d need this knowledge. He gets to the surgical tools, pulls a scalpel from its robotic arm, and uses it to slash away as much of the exosuit as possible.

But her life signals are now in the red zone. Further delay means failure. Abel steps back and hits the activator again. The panels fold around Noemi, and he stares down at her face as the pod fills first with vapor, then with liquid. Her features blur; her black hair floats around her in an uncertain halo.

A light on the control panel blinks green as an automated voice says, “Cryosleep activated.”

Abel feels as though he can breathe again. While the cryosleep pod rotates back into standing position, he watches the readouts to monitor her life signals. Already they’re slowing as the chill settles into marrow, blood, and brain. That’s entirely normal. But he also knows that she was so weak when he put her in that, even preserved this way, she might not survive any attempts to replace or regenerate her damaged organs. All this has bought her is a chance.

Abel will take what he can.

He waits until the process is complete, watching her the entire time. She seems to be floating in mist like some ethereal spirit in a fairy tale. His imagination is normally not so given to metaphor and simile; he has to gentle the truth of Noemi’s condition to come to terms with it. She is suspended between life and death.

In a fairy tale, the hero would have to face great trials to bring the heroine back to life: slaying dragons, undoing spells. Abel only has to remember where he came from, and what the future generations of his people will become.

The Inheritors won’t be equal parts man and machine; they’ll be far more organic. More powerful than even Abel himself. And they’ll live even longer. Gillian Shearer can’t transfer a human consciousness yet. But what if Noemi’s consciousness remains in her body, and then that body can be changed?

There must be ways to add organic mech components to a human body. The new transhumanism Gillian Shearer dabbles in—those technologies would be linked, too. It would be possible to synthesize both real and artificial DNA to make Noemi… not an Inheritor. Something else. A mech and yet not a mech. Something entirely new, but not someone new. It will still be her.

Abel’s cheeks feel oddly stiff—salt from the tears he must have shed without realizing it. He can tell that now because he’s begun to smile. The pain he feels is even greater than what he felt in the moment when he parted from Noemi before, greater than what he felt in the instant when he realized Mansfield had abandoned him alone in space, in an imprisonment that would last for thirty years. But he now possesses what he didn’t have back then: hope. This pain is endurable because it points him in the direction he needs to go.

The pain will lead him back to Haven. To Gillian Shearer. And possibly to his own doom.

He can’t do this without Gillian’s help. The price of that help can only be one thing: Abel’s surrender. She’ll want to replace his soul with the stored consciousness of Burton Mansfield. If it comes to that, Abel will agree. His life for Noemi’s—it’s a simple exchange, one he doesn’t have to question.

Maybe it won’t come to that. There are always possibilities. Always variables. Abel will do whatever it takes to save Noemi, but he refuses to admit defeat.

His entire body feels weak, and his chest aches as though he were the one who had been wounded. Still he presses on, transferring auxiliary control to a nearby console, so he can steer them away from the battlefield and toward the Genesis Gate.

Beyond that lies Noemi’s last hope.

He walks back to her cryosleep pod again to double-check the readings; it helps to be absolutely sure she’s in complete stasis. As he gets closer, he sees that one of her hands has drifted close to the outer shell. He presses his against it, feeling the burn of the cold against his skin. As he looks up at her face, Abel whispers the word that nearly destroyed him, Mansfield’s old fail-safe code. It’s the same word that will bring Noemi back to him again.

“Resurrection.”