10

NOEMI’S COORDINATION HASN’T IMPROVED ENOUGH FOR her to move quickly. Abel lifts her onto his back and runs for the perimeter of the Winter Castle complex. Although they startle a handful of humans on the way—former Osiris passengers, no doubt shocked to be discovered here on their “secret” planet—nobody attempts to stop them.

Gillian Shearer doesn’t know we’ve escaped yet. The Charlies and Queens are busy with their futile attempt to turn back the tide of ships headed for Haven. Only a handful of the Castle residents would recognize us. We have an 81.87 percent chance of making it to the vehicle bay without being stopped.

Once they’re out in the snow, however, they’ll be exposed and the dangers will increase… but perhaps it would be better to turn to that challenge when they face it.

The fighter mechs must be using nearly every snowmobile the Winter Castle possesses, but three remain. Abel settles Noemi on the fastest model and takes the piloting position. Her arms wrap around his waist as he powers up the machine, then zooms toward the bright rectangle of sunlight that marks their way out.

Abel had calculated that the landing force would be many hundreds of ships. At the moment, he seems to have slightly overestimated the number—and yet, he hadn’t factored in the sheer chaos of their arrival.

He steers them across the snow, Noemi’s arms still clasped around his waist. In a dozen directions around them, scenes of violence and fear play out. Nearby, a Vagabond family whose ship is painted with the old Russian flag is apparently beating a Charlie mech to circuits. Farther away, blaster bolts sizzle through snow, and human shapes fall. The carnage is useless; the wave of settlers will be beyond any control. And yet the mechs fight on.

Gillian Shearer never knows when to quit.

The grayish sky overhead reveals still more ships coming, casting dark specks over the light of Haven’s many moons. If they’re lucky, Gillian won’t realize Abel’s escaped the lab until he and Noemi are already halfway to the Gate.

She doesn’t. Their luck holds. They make it to their ship unharmed.

Never before has the Persephone’s teardrop shape looked so welcome. Abel ditches the snowmobile, helps Noemi aboard, and takes off as fast as cybernetically possible. The course has already been laid in; he only needs to reactivate the autopilot he’d set up for Noemi’s use alone, with a few modifications for different phases of lunar orbit. Within 4.71 minutes, they’re rocketing up from the surface, headed for deep space.

He watches in satisfaction as Haven shrinks on the bridge viewscreen. When the doors slide open, he turns to see Noemi shakily making her way toward the ops station.

“We’re free,” he says. It is truer for them both than it has ever been before.

Noemi doesn’t appear to feel the same way. Her eyes don’t meet his as she flops into her seat. “Is this what freedom feels like?”

This statement is difficult to interpret. “What troubles you?”

She gives him a look as though he’d begun speaking in a language she doesn’t know. “Abel… do you even realize what happened to me? What Shearer did to me?”

“You mean your hybridization? That’s what we’re calling the process, for now; it is an unprecedented medical procedure, one we invented, and admittedly all the ramifications are not yet known. But I supervised Gillian’s work, so I’m as familiar with the procedure as anyone.” Perhaps Noemi was too dazed to make much sense of the explanation they gave her earlier. “You were too seriously wounded for medical intervention. Your only chance at survival was through the implantation and integration of organic mech parts. Gillian Shearer—”

“No. I understand that.” She pauses, then adds, “I do understand,” as though she were convincing herself. Her gaze remains fixed on the floor. “But you don’t realize how it feels. I don’t know how to walk. How strong I am, or how fast I move, or how I feel, or—or anything. I’m not even at home in my own body.”

“You’re in a new state,” he says. “A period of transition is inevitable.”

“And how long will that take? Hours or years or what?”

Abel has to admit, “I don’t know.”

“Oh my God, how long will I live?” Noemi’s eyes widen. “Do I still have a normal human life span or will I live for a couple of centuries, like a mech? I know I’m not totally a mech, but I—I’m not fully human anymore either.”

Abel wishes she would look up at him. “You’re the best of both, I think.”

Noemi brushes her hand along her scalp. A faint fuzz of hair has already grown back. “That’s what you see. The rest of the galaxy is going to think I’m a freak.”

“Surely that is irrelevant compared with your own self-image—”

“First of all, I don’t know what my self-image is right now, but since I can’t even walk straight, it’s not super high. Second, it’s not irrelevant! The way people treat you—it matters. I’m going to have to lie about what I am—”

“I lie by omission,” Abel offers. “It’s an easy habit to acquire.”

Noemi shoots back, “I don’t want to live a lie.”

He has no response for that.

The silence that stretches out between them lasts a mere 7.3 seconds, but seems to last longer. Abel has always known that humans perceive time differently than mechs—faster when busy or happy, slower when bored or sad. However, this illusion is apparently one he can share under conditions of sufficient awkwardness.

Why is Noemi so unhappy? Surely she can’t be displeased that he saved her life. If she were, that would mean she thinks of being part mech as being less than human. The transitive property would then indicate that she thought of him as less than human. Since very early in their relationship, Noemi has always accepted him as her equal.

Hasn’t she?

Abel finds this question so disquieting that he immediately pushes it aside. “How do you feel?”

“Tired. I’m going to try to get some rest. It’s weird how cryosleep makes you really tired. If you’re asleep for days or weeks or months on end, you ought to at least be well-rested, right?” Noemi blinks. “My brain just told me the physiological explanation for that.”

“It will be a new experience for me, not having to explain so many things to you.”

She gives him the look that means What you just said isn’t what you should’ve said. He’ll analyze his error later. Maybe Noemi is merely exhausted into unusual levels of irritability. Humans are like that sometimes, and despite her fears, she is still mostly human.

“Well, call me for the Haven Gate.” She rises to her feet and stumbles toward the door. The clumsiness is so unfamiliar, so unlike her, that he briefly glimpses how alien her body must have become. “Zayan and Harriet both said they refuse to sleep their way through a Gate ever again, because apparently dreams get beyond bizarre.”

Abel has heard them complain about this before. Zayan once dreamed he had become a lasagna—to be specific, a lasagna with opinions about politics, frustrated about its inability to share these thoughts with a galaxy not yet ready to listen to pasta. “I’ll summon you for the Gate,” Abel agrees.

As the bridge doors slide open for her, Noemi pauses. “Abel, thanks for being willing to make that sacrifice for me. For taking that chance. Even if right now I feel like—” She sighs. “It means a lot.”

Abel can only answer, “Always.”

Their eyes meet, and the strangeness between them fades—until she turns and trudges toward the door.

He settles into his captain’s chair, attempting to analyze her earlier reactions. Yes, the experience of suddenly gaining mech capabilities must be overwhelming to a limited human mind. Yet Noemi almost seems to be rejecting her new status entirely.

She accepts me as the equal of a human, Abel reasons. Why can’t she then accept herself?

Perhaps he was wrong about Noemi’s acceptance. Her total repudiation of her own mech half indicates a level of—underestimation, or even contempt. In her eyes, he might not truly be as alive and valid an individual as a human being. Maybe she never saw him as being “as good as.” Only “good enough” to merit rights of his own.

The difference between those things is far larger than he would’ve anticipated.

Just before reaching the door, Noemi stops short and looks back at him in fear. “Oh my God. Darius Akide. Where is he? How did you get away from him?”

Abel remembers the crunch of Akide’s spinal cord between his hands. His initial impulse had been to tell Noemi about this immediately—but now things are uneasy between them. Is this really the time to tell her he’s capable of killing humans without orders, without needing to save anyone?

He says, “I overpowered Akide, and ejected him and his transfer pod while you were in cryosleep.”

Every word of that is accurate. He simply omitted the fact that when he put Darius Akide in the pod, Akide was already dead.

Noemi pauses, then slowly, haltingly walks back toward Abel. “If you’d told me that earlier, I would’ve believed you. But now I can’t help but listen to the voice in my head that’s analyzing every single thing you left out of that story.”

Indirectness will not serve me as well in the future, he thinks.

“Tell me the whole truth,” she insists.

It’s been a long time since Abel wasn’t sure he could trust Noemi with the whole truth about anything. His trepidation doesn’t change the fact that he owes her that truth. “I killed him.”

She sways on her feet. For 3.1 seconds, dreadful suspense stretches between them. Then she shakes her head, as though to clear it, and says, “It was self-defense. Of course. Akide was trying to kidnap you—I saw it myself. He was going to use you to destroy the Genesis Gate, which means he was trying to kill you—”

“This is all true,” Abel says. He stands up, as rigidly correct as he was on the day they met. “However, I didn’t kill him in self-defense. I killed Akide because I thought Akide had killed you. It was an act of fury. An act of revenge. It was murder.”

Noemi puts her hand to her mouth. Is she trying to remain silent? Afraid she’ll throw up? Abel’s programming doesn’t allow him to guess.

He continues, “My programming ought to prevent me from killing a human for any reason besides defending another human. It didn’t. Instead, the killing felt—natural, instinctive. It took me a while to understand why, but finally I realized that was because what I did had nothing to do with being a mech. That was my human side. Killing Akide was the most human thing I’ve ever done. If that’s humanity, I must again question why so many humans consider themselves superior to mechs.”

She winces as though his words had caused her physical pain. He waits for her answer, expecting it to be terrible. Maybe she doesn’t trust him any longer.

When she speaks, however, she surprises him: “Does Genesis know?”

“Do you mean, have the authorities learned that I killed Darius Akide?” Noemi nods, so Abel continues, “I’m not sure. As he was operating with the authority of the Council, they must at least know that he set out to apprehend me in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Genesis. By this point, they’ll be aware that Akide failed to execute his plan. But I don’t have sufficient data to determine whether they know that Akide reached my ship, or that he’s dead.”

Grimacing, she asks, “What did you do with… with the body?”

“I put it back in his transport pod and ejected that pod just before leaving the Cray system, on a trajectory that should’ve sent it crashing into the other planet in that system. As that world is even hotter than Cray, with an almost wholly volcanic surface, Akide and his pod would’ve been vaporized. I calculate only a five point two two percent chance that the pod would be detected by Cray sensors, and only a zero point eight one percent chance that Cray would’ve had any chance to intervene between detecting the pod and its destruction.”

Another long silence stretches between them; Abel refuses to measure this one. Finally, Noemi begins to nod. “Good.”

“Good?”

“He tried to kill you. He basically did kill me. Genesis would’ve let him get away with that. If you’d left Akide alive, he would’ve stopped you from saving me. So as far as I’m concerned, he got what he deserved.”

It’s Abel’s turn to stare. “I would’ve thought revenge was a value inconsistent with Christianity.”

“It should be,” Noemi agrees. “But pretty much all of human history proves that wrong. Besides, I’ve never been a perfect Christian. I’ve tried, and I’ve tried, and I’ve studied my Second Catholic catechism until I almost have it memorized, and none of it changes the fact that I’m almost glad Akide’s dead.”

She’s disquieted; Abel can tell. This discord between her beliefs and her feelings is one they should get into sometime.

But not now.

“You’re tired,” he says gently. “Try to rest. We’ll talk about it more later.”

“I don’t care if we never talk about it again,” Noemi insists, but she turns to go. Maybe she’s only sleepy, or maybe she needs some time alone to think about this.

Abel knows he does.