8

ABEL STANDS IN A KIND OF CAGE MADE OF LIGHT—SENSOR beams that periodically sweep different sections of his body, checking and rechecking data. Gillian Shearer stands on the far side of the lab, staring at his readouts rather than at her prisoner himself. Some murderers might do this as a way of dehumanizing their victim, but Gillian never thought of him as the equal of a human.

This is merely caution. She took his report of damage seriously, which was both wise of her and lucky for him. In theory, more time in captivity should mean more chances for him to escape.

In reality, no chances have yet become apparent. Rather than becoming discouraged, Abel remains focused. He doesn’t need many chances, only one.

One that needs to arrive soon. To be precise, within the next 9.87 minutes.

“Internal wireless capabilities are almost completely shot,” Gillian says. “How did you do this?”

“Genesis forces were under heavy fire in the most recent battle.”

“And you got hit?” She raises one eyebrow, as starkly red as a scar. “I’m surprised you came out as well as you did.”

“My ability for self-repair is considerable,” Abel points out. Both of his previous two statements were factual, but neither was relevant. He has no intention of telling Gillian what he was able to do at the Battle of Genesis—how he reached out with the machine side of himself and stopped Earth’s mechs from attacking Genesis forces. Instead, they destroyed one another. That ability has proved dangerous, and Abel’s unsure the circumstances will ever be dire enough for him to do that again. But if Gillian ever learned the full truth, she would no doubt launch into other tests and experiments equally painful and even more hazardous.

However, that might buy him more time.…

“It doesn’t surprise me that your non-wired communications overloaded. They’re a generation out of date.” Gillian’s fingertips fly over her console as she speaks. Still she doesn’t look up. “That’s really the only way in which you’re outdated, Model One A. You don’t come close to Tether capability.”

“Tether capability?” Abel frowns. “I’ve never heard of this, and I’ve been studying cybernetic advancements.”

Gillian shrugs. “Nobody much talks about the Tether. It would be like—like designing the fastest spaceship known to humankind and talking about the color of the chairs. Tether tech is simple. It’s functional. It’s… invisible, the way the best technologies should be.”

“Is it hardware or software?”

“Both, in a manner of speaking,” Gillian says. “AI systems designed to communicate wirelessly usually have immense storage for complex signals, plus the bandwidth to handle Tether-coded signals. You know, ships, massive mainframes, remote-intercept data solids, that kind of thing. Mechs, however, don’t have that bandwidth or that storage. So they require certain hardware, which you lack.”

Abel feels almost offended. “I’ve never noticed any lack.”

“Only machines programmed to analyze communication would ever notice the difference. Well, other machines and my father. So we should get that taken care of before we do anything else.”

How perverse of her to keep saying “we,” Abel thinks. As though I were cooperating.

Gillian steps closer, a small silver cylinder held within her fingers. “I can do the hardware update manually. Fortunately we don’t have to open up your cranium; it’s easiest to just go up the nose.”

Easiest for her, she means.

The following few minutes are incredibly uncomfortable. Abel feels the cool metal being pushed up his nostril, then the burst of pain as it begins moving through the membranes that seal off his brain. Blood wells up anew, trickling from his nose and staining Gillian’s glove. He can taste it in the back of his throat. A human undergoing this would either panic or pass out, probably both, before their inevitable death. Abel simply forces himself to think about something else. Something more pleasant. Which in this case could be nearly anything in the galaxy.

What he chooses to think about is Noemi’s getaway. By now she should be at least halfway to the Haven Gate. She should also have regained some basic motor control, which means she’ll also have tried to rescue him and found his fail-safe message. At this very moment, Abel calculates, there is an 86.39 percent chance that Noemi is absolutely furious.

He imagines her fury, and smiles.

“That felt good to you?” Gillian gives him a look as she strips off her bloody gloves. “It shouldn’t have.”

“It was bearable,” Abel says. He swallows another gulp of blood as she squirts a medi-gel up his nose to seal off the worst of the bleeding.

“Good. Time to test it out.” She taps in a command on the console, then pauses. “Anything?”

“No.”

“I’ll know if you’re lying.”

“Then you should know that I’m not.” Abel “hears” nothing, receives no data.

With a scowl, Gillian turns back to her control panels, studying readouts for a clue as to what might’ve gone wrong. Surely, with her expertise, she’s more than capable of simple hardware installation. Apparently she erred this time, but she’ll get it right soon. So this delay seems unlikely to last long.

Stall, he thinks. It is his one productive option.

So he asks, “Are you certain Professor Mansfield’s consciousness was fully preserved?” It would be especially galling for his soul to be destroyed to make room for another if that other is unable to function.

“Oh, yes.” A flicker of dismay remains on Gillian’s face, but she must not be that worried, because she’s already getting back to work. “We’ve been working on consciousness storage for a long time, you know.”

“At least since my creation,” he says.

She laughs. “Long before that! There wouldn’t have been any point to you otherwise.”

That stings—and yet, he sees the logic of it.

She continues, “Father first became interested when Mummy became ill. He’s always hoped to find a home for her. Someday, we will.”

Gillian’s gaze turns toward a wall of devices and components—a memory storage unit here, a metal knee joint there. One item on the shelves is different from the others: a box of ornately carved wood. He ought to have noticed it before. The box is large enough to contain a remote-intercept data solid, the kind of thing Mansfield uses to contain a soul.

“Your father managed to preserve the consciousness of the late Robin Mansfield,” Abel says. “He could do it perfectly that long ago?”

The brief cheer on her face fades. “Not perfectly,” she admits.

“How do you know that? How do you know she’s stored at all?” Consciousness transfer is probably Mansfield’s single most brilliant achievement, and it’s the one Abel has deliberately refused to learn about. It is, after all, the way he’ll die.

Gillian replies, “We tried developing a written interface, but she couldn’t respond to that. So I suggested—I was a girl, understand—I suggested a Ouija board.”

“A… Ouija board.” Abel tries to imagine Burton Mansfield stooping to this, and can’t. Yet it must’ve happened.

“We magnetized a planchette so Mum was able to move a cursor on the board. She spelled out words, and answered yes-or-no questions.” Gillian isn’t looking directly at Abel any longer; this part is harder for her to remember. “Mummy got some of the questions wrong, and some of what she said made no sense. So, obviously, there’s been consciousness damage, or incomplete storage. But it is her. She’s in there.”

“But you have no Inheritor mech for her, nor can you build one,” Abel says. For an Inheritor to take on someone else’s consciousness, it must be created using genetic material from that same person, taken during their youth. This is something Mansfield didn’t discover until Robin Mansfield had been dead for decades.

Gillian shrugs, trying to come across as casual. “We’ll have to come up with a different solution for her. But we will. Soon the whole family will be together again.”

She thinks she’ll get them all back: her mother, her father, and Simon, the young son she lost only a few months ago. The first attempt at loading Simon’s consciousness into a mech body ended tragically; the body wasn’t fully developed, and nobody had prepared the child for the shocking transformation. Simon couldn’t understand what had happened to him—and his resulting terror and anger had contributed to fatal malfunctions. Surely Robin Mansfield would be even more confused, if her damaged consciousness is still capable of a state of mind that could be called confusion.…

Abel realizes he’s trying to solve Mansfield’s problems instead of looking out for his own safety. Directive One still has its power.

“Dr. Shearer, we have a proximity alert,” intones the voice of a Queen mech, through one small speaker that must connect this lab to the Winter Castle’s central security. “We’ve detected multiple ships on planetary approach.”

Gillian gapes with shock. She takes two steps from the console, staring up at the speaker as though it were the source of the problem and not the messenger. “That can’t be right. How could anyone possibly—what are you grinning about?”

Abel continues to grin. “Did I not mention that Noemi informed the entire galaxy of Haven’s existence more than a week ago?”

“What?”

“Millions of people from Earth, Stronghold, Kismet—even the Vagabonds—they’re all looking for a new home,” he says. “The kind of home they might have on Haven. Although we did not give them the specific coordinates of the Haven Gate, the search would’ve been intense, and has now been successful. I’d predict at least hundreds of ships are on their way here now. Within days, there’ll be thousands. Even tens of thousands.”

Cold fury in every syllable, she says, “This world is ours.”

“You should tell that to the overwhelming majority of its population, as of a few minutes from now.” Abel’s never been so polite, so crisp, so formal. Puncturing at least one of Gillian Shearer’s ambitions feels richly satisfying. He reminds himself to study human concepts of revenge. “By tomorrow, the Winter Castle may be no more than a small town. That would give you the approximate authority of—a mayor?”

Gillian mutters a word so obscene that Abel’s been programmed never to repeat it, then dashes out the door. She leaves him alone, unguarded.

His one chance has come.