4

TWENTY-ONE HOURS AFTER VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT DEPARTURE, the Persephone reaches the Haven Gate.

To Abel’s relief, the gate remains relatively unguarded so far. The few patrol vessels in the area are easily eluded, and he slips through undetected.

Earth is still trying to hide the Gate, he muses. Noemi’s message made the entire galaxy aware of Haven’s existence. Literal millions of people will be searching for the Gate Earth tried so hard to keep secret. Putting a full military guard around it would only draw attention to the area, making its discovery more likely.

Despite this attempt at concealment, Abel predicts the Gate will be found, and soon. Haven provides one of the few potential homes in the galaxy. It is nearly as large and as potentially fertile as Genesis. Humans can survive there, provided they’ve either survived the Cobweb plague—a disease designed to bioengineer humans for this very environment—or undergone a treatment protocol with a weakened form of the virus. Given the disastrous spread of Cobweb, millions if not billions of people are prepared for this new world.

More than that, they’re desperate. Earth’s climate has been unhealthy for generations and will soon no longer support human life. If the billions of people about to be displaced thought they might find a home on Genesis after winning the Liberty War, Earth’s defeat in the last battle will have convinced them otherwise.

Other ships will follow, Abel thinks. Haven won’t stay hidden much longer.

Flying into its frosty atmosphere, Abel again notes the pale cloudless sky, which is scalloped with the silvery crescents of some of the planet’s fifteen moons. Forests of dark-blue conifers stand out against the endless blanket of snow. The only animal life he observes comes in the form of swirling clouds of marsupial bats. He’s deduced that many other animals live here—these forms of plant life require insect fertilization, at minimum—but the ship’s sensors don’t pick them up in the immediate area.

What they do pick up is the Winter Castle.

It shines like a palace of crystal on the horizon. The structure is less a single building, more an enclosed town. Abel only observed it from a distance before, but now that the Persephone is drawing closer, he can fully appreciate both its beauty and its genius. Most human observers would think the tall, prismatic spires were merely lovely, but Abel recognizes the glitter of solar micro-panels. They must generate a tremendous amount of power, more than enough for the few hundred people who live there now. The passengers on the crashed Osiris hadn’t made it as far as the Winter Castle when he was last here approximately two weeks earlier, but he detects flickers of light within windows, the distant hum of energy. The survivors have made that trek and are settling into their new home.

As he zooms in closer, he can detect greenery inside—arboretums and hydroponic gardens have been built. The plant life will both purify the atmosphere and provide fresh, healthy food. Only one set of doors is visible, but he spots many small hatches that could release mechs or ships to gather anything needed and bring it back to those inside.

It is a work of brilliance. Abel recognizes it as he would his own fingerprint. Both he and the Winter Castle can only have been designed by the same person: Burton Mansfield.

He glances toward the shadow on the horizon that marks the wreckage of the Osiris. That ship brought these settlers here, with Mansfield aboard—and with Noemi as Mansfield’s prisoner. It, too, was a kind of artwork, beautiful and brilliant at once.

Now it is charred metal and broken tile. It is the grave for Mansfield’s body.

Abel wonders if he, too, is about to be used up, burnt up. Whether he will become just the marker for a soul that used to exist.

He lands his ship in a small cavern approximately two kilometers from the Winter Castle. Purple crystals glint dully from the Persephone’s landing lights as he settles it down. A scan of the surrounding geology suggests these crystals are amethysts, but this interests Abel less than the fact that sensors would have difficulty penetrating the cave walls and finding the Persephone. He’s hidden his ship as well as he possibly can.

Of course he’ll have to lead others here eventually. But by the time he returns, a bargain will have been struck. Noemi will be safe. The cavern must protect her until then.

He hesitates at the door, tempted to turn back and look at Noemi one more time. But he doesn’t. It would be entirely irrational, and for the next few hours, he may do better listening to his machine programming rather than his human soul.

At his belt, he attaches a personal force field—the sort of thing normally worn with an exosuit for protection from exposure to deep space. His color vision tints gray—a natural side effect of the field. Such things are virtually never used without exosuits, because their energies would disrupt human brain waves. Abel’s skull is made of stronger stuff. The field is nearly invisible, betrayed only by a faint golden glow along his skin.

Shielded only by this and his hyperwarm parka, Abel sets out toward the Winter Castle.

Gillian Shearer is almost certainly a person in authority among the humans currently living on Haven, he reasons as he trudges through the thick snow. Most likely she is the principal authority—

His thought stops. His movement stops.

Pain arcs through every millimeter of his body, so shocking that he almost can’t process it. He topples sideways into the snow, utterly stiff. Most humans would be knocked unconscious, but Abel stays awake. Barely.

A stun weapon, he thinks, insofar as he can think. Force fields don’t provide complete protection from those. Someone or, more likely, something is patrolling the area, and little time remains for him to escape.

He tries moving his hand. It twitches, nothing more. Still, it’s a start. He’s encouraged for the 18.11 seconds before he hears footsteps crunching in the snow.

When the Charlie mech leans over him, blaster in hand, Abel tries to speak but can’t yet. All his hopes of bargaining with Gillian—of making his surrender mean something—are at risk. He can’t do anything as the mech grasps Abel’s arm in its hand.

Then the Charlie stumbles to the side. Just a step—no more—and immediately it appears to recover itself. The strangeness of seeing a clumsy mech would, at any other time, excite Abel’s curiosity. Now he simply lies there as the Charlie lifts its wrist to its face and begins speaking into the small comm strapped to his glove: “The model sought by Dr. Shearer has been identified and apprehended.”

Abel had hoped to negotiate as a free man. He must prepare to do so as a prisoner.

He is transported to Shearer’s lab in an enormous white sack. This is unfortunate for two reasons. First, it gives him very little chance to work out the inner schematics of the Winter Castle.

Second, it’s completely undignified. The second reason is far less important than the first, but he’s keenly aware of it as he’s dumped out on the floor of a room that’s entirely, pristinely white.

“At last,” says Gillian Shearer. “Model One A.”

Abel manages to prop himself up and look at her. She’s shorter than the average human female, but she radiates authority. Confidence. Power. Her brilliant red hair and blue eyes stand out sharply in this white-on-white laboratory, including the coverall she wears. Gillian is ready to get to work.

He knew her as a little girl. She had seemed to love him in those days. That time seems longer ago than it was.

Then she surprises him. “You came back to Haven of your own free will. You had no logical reason to do that, and multiple reasons not to. Did Directive One finally kick in?”

Gillian, just like her father, can’t fully accept that Abel’s core programming no longer controls him. He says, “No. I have a proposition to make.”

The corner of her mouth twitches in a smile. “You’re not in a position to declare terms.”

“Don’t be so sure.” He points to the small box at his belt. This isn’t much of a gambit, but it’s all he’s got.

Gillian’s face falls as she recognizes the faint shimmer of the force field. “They didn’t take that from you?”

“The mechs you sent after me can’t think for themselves, as you must be aware. Even if they could, I’ve set the force field to deactivate only when a code is input. An incorrect code will result in a self-destruct—not tremendously powerful, as explosions go, but it would be sufficient to destroy me.” Stiff from the electromagnetic “squeeze” of the field, Abel rises to his feet.

“You’re having trouble moving?” Gillian regains some of her smugness. “Doesn’t look like you can wear that field forever.”

“I can.” With great effort, he doesn’t add. Abel needs to keep the bargaining advantage. “Also, you should know that I’ve recently taken damage—possibly significant damage to key systems. It’s the kind of damage unlikely to show up on a scan. The kind that might prevent you from achieving your goal.”

“You could be bluffing about the damage,” Gillian says. “But why come here if you legitimately thought you had nothing to bargain with?”

The rhetorical question is more for herself than for Abel. He continues, “I also want to give you a challenge. The chance to do something unique in the world of organic cybernetics. Something your father never even attempted.”

She pauses for 1.5 seconds. Abel knows Gillian is loyal to her father, but he’s studied her recent cybernetic work. She obviously wants to make breakthroughs of her own. “What would that be?”

“Noemi Vidal has been seriously injured. She needs more organ replacements than the human body will accept. No standard medical treatment can save her. However, if you were to use some of the organic technology you’ve developed—and you were to transplant it into Noemi’s body while she’s still alive—”

“You want to use cybernetic parts as med tech?” Gillian hasn’t spent much of her life trying to heal human bodies; she’d rather make them obsolete. But the novelty of this idea obviously intrigues her. “How would that work?”

“I don’t know any better than you do,” Abel admits. “However, I would work alongside you to come up with the correct process.”

“It’s going to take days, weeks. It could even take months. My father shouldn’t have to wait so long in limbo—”

“The alternative is waiting forever,” he points out.

She folds her arms in front of her. “There’s no guarantee of success. I want your word you’ll surrender yourself to me at the end, regardless.”

“You can’t think much of your father’s programming, if you think he would’ve made me foolish enough to take such a deal.” Abel shakes his head. “You need incentive to succeed.”

Gillian narrows her eyes. “You’ll find it difficult to escape, you know. You’re on my planet. In my castle.”

“I appreciate a challenge. I hope you do as well.”

After a long pause, she murmurs, “After modification on this scale, the patient would—well, would no longer be entirely human. It would be a hybrid. A true human-mech hybrid.”

“You’re interested,” Abel says.

“Yes. And you understand the price.”

He nods. This is something he’s realized from the beginning.

She raises her head. “You’ll shut off the force field. You’ll surrender to me. And you will allow me to transfer my father’s consciousness into your body—which is what you were made to do in the first place.” The last words are spit at him, as though it were indecent of Abel to fight such a cruel fate.

He must lay out his conditions. “I’ll do all this… upon Noemi Vidal’s recovery to consciousness and her free departure from the planet Haven in my ship.”

“She’ll be an unprecedented leap forward in cybernetics,” Gillian argues. “I should get the chance to study her. To analyze how a mech nervous system interacts with a mostly human body.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to reserve that honor for your next test subject. Noemi leaves Haven, alive and well, or there’s no deal.”

White-faced, Gillian straightens. “My father deserves his chance to come back from the dead. He earned it the day he made you.”

Yes, this is what he was made for. The reason he was born. Mansfield never saw Abel as anything but a potential vessel for his own mind, thoughts, and ambitions. The fact that Abel’s own soul will be destroyed in the transfer… that never mattered much to Mansfield.

Now it doesn’t matter to Abel either. Not if it saves Noemi.

The following fifteen days, twenty-one hours, and five minutes are filled with unique intellectual challenges, the sort of thing Abel would enjoy under other circumstances. But even science is no fun under this kind of pressure.

If he gets anything wrong, Noemi will die.

The cryosleep pod is brought inside like a glass coffin from a fairy tale, held high on mech shoulders, opalescent fluid swirling within. It is settled in the middle of the stark white lab, the center around which they all rotate. Noemi remains in the pod during the long days in which Abel and Gillian try to invent a new field of science on the spot.

“She won’t be able to coordinate mech parts and human movement,” Gillian says late one night, as they work outside the pod. “A human nervous system won’t do it.”

“You want to implant a cybernetic one?” Abel’s unsure about this, though he sees the need as well as Gillian does. “Supplementing a human nervous system with a cybernetic one has never been done—not with clone parts, donors, ever.”

“You want to leave her completely unable to function?” Gillian raises an eyebrow. “This is your option. If I didn’t think it would work, I wouldn’t offer it, would I?”

Remaining unspoken are the words because I have to succeed to destroy you.

It must be human, this desire to avoid the inevitable. But Abel cannot let Noemi continue to linger between life and death. “Let’s design the nervous system.”

In some ways, this process is deeply intimate: Abel examines every nerve ending in Noemi’s body, watches the slowly undulating patterns of her unconscious brain activity, traces the flow of her blood. But that intimacy makes what should be routine feel savage—like removing her pulpy, ruined liver from her open abdomen with his own hands, seeing his gloves become red and slippery from the gore. Or shearing her hair from her head, preparing to slice through her skull to unite her mech and human brains.

The odds of Noemi’s survival improve as he and Gillian work, but they’re never good enough for him. It seems impossible that Noemi will ever emerge whole again—that she could be the same again.

She won’t be the same, he reminds himself. But she’ll still be Noemi.

Why doesn’t it feel like enough?

Maybe because he knows he won’t be there with her.

Finally, there comes a point where every test has been run, every procedure performed. Abel and Gillian have managed to work side by side all these days without ever looking each other in the eye, but she does so at last as she says, “We have to take her off systems. See if she survives.”

“I know,” Abel says, but he doesn’t move away from the modified pod they’ve built. Noemi lies still within it, lungs breathing only on cue. Will they continue once the machines are shut off?

Only one way to find out.