Defy the Stars

by Claudia Gray

  “A fail-safe.” Abel sets down the scanner. “The Queen was programmed with a fail-safe.”

  Noemi grabs his arm, dismay turning to fear. “What kind of fail-safe?”

  “I don’t know the first element. Probably it was ‘proximity to a Gate.’ But the second element was ‘proximity to an operational thermomagnetic device.’” Turning to Noemi, he explains, “That’s what our mission was about, thirty years ago. Finding the vulnerabilities in a Gate. We found one. And Mansfield took steps to patch that security breach.”

  “But how could he have known we would try it with this Queen model?” she protests.

  “He didn’t. Therefore, the only explanation is that he installed the fail-safe on every model of mech in existence sophisticated enough to handle the piloting tasks. Every single one.” Abel would like to be angry with Mansfield again, but instead he feels only a muted sense of admiration. His creator has proved selfish, unfeeling, even cruel—but his intelligence cannot be doubted. “As the head of the Mansfield Cybernetics line, as soon as he devised the fail-safe, he could have seen it downloaded or installed on every mech in the galaxy.”

  Noemi’s voice shakes. “So you’re telling me we have nothing.”

  Abel can only reply, “Nothing at all.”

  39

  NOTHING.

  It’s all been for nothing.

  Noemi slumps against the side of her battle-scarred silver fighter, torn between grief and rage. This entire journey—everything she’s been through, everything that’s been lost—she’s told herself it has a purpose. The racking fevers of Cobweb, the terror of being hunted by the Queen and Charlie, Abel’s abduction, and, worst of all, Esther’s death: Noemi has endured because she knew that was the cost of saving her world.

  But her world can’t be saved. She’s been chasing a mirage from the start.

  “You’re sure that’s true for all mechs everywhere?” She will not cry. She will not. “Every single one of them that could fly the fighter?”

  Abel looks up from the dead Queen model. “Almost certainly. Maybe a handful of mechs were never updated with the fail-safe, but they would by definition be located in out-of-the-way places. They’d be difficult to find and even more difficult to identify. The odds of finding one in time would be… You don’t want to hear the odds, do you?”

  “No. I understand. It’s impossible.”

  So she’ll go home. She has forty hours to see her friends and make her peace, and say good-bye to her life. Then she’ll rejoin her friends on her flight squad for the Masada Run.

  At least she’ll die knowing she bought Genesis some time. And if nothing else, she saved Abel.

  “That’s it, then.” Noemi’s voice betrays her, cracking on the last word, but she keeps going. “The plan won’t work. It’s over.”

  Abel says, “Not if you use me.”

  It takes a few seconds to sink in. “You can’t.”

  Unsurprisingly, he takes her literally. “I can. As I said before, only mechs not updated in the past thirty years could make it through the Gate with the device. I qualify.”

  “Abel, no. I told you before, I’m not giving you those orders. You have a soul, so you’re—you’re too human to be used like a device.”

  “Then I’m human enough to make the decision on my own.” He speaks without hesitation. Without doubt.

  “But you can’t.” Noemi can hardly put the reasons into words; so many crowd into her mind at once that she could never go through them all. She only knows the thought of Abel’s death is even more terrible to her than the thought of her own. “Genesis isn’t your planet. You owe us nothing.”

  “I’ve come to believe in the essential rightness of Genesis’s cause,” he says, astonishing her further. “While I might personally have selected a different course of action, it’s clear that humanity’s best potential home in the cosmos must be protected. It is equally clear that Earth’s government has no intention of modifying the behaviors that would poison your planet. Whatever else happens to Earth and its colony worlds, Genesis must survive.”

  “The Gate doesn’t have to be destroyed for us to survive! When the Masada Run is complete, we’ll have bought Genesis some time. Years, maybe. Those years could make all the difference in the war.”

  “You would fly in the Masada Run,” Abel says. “You would die.”

  “That’s always been true. It never changed. I only thought it had.”

  “I can’t let that happen, Noemi. Even if I weren’t willing to die for Genesis, I would die for you.”

  “Your life isn’t worth less than mine! You don’t have to follow Mansfield’s rules anymore.”

  “I did not mean that I would die for you because you’re human. I would die for you because I love you.”

  It steals the breath from Noemi’s lungs. She can only stare at him as—incredibly—Abel begins to smile.

  “Maybe it’s not love the way a human would feel it,” he says. “Maybe it’s only a… simulation of love, a close analogue. But I feel it with all the strength I have to feel anything. Over the past weeks, I’ve come to—to listen for your voice, because I hope to hear it. I pay attention to irrelevant details of your mannerisms and appearance because I find them pleasing. I’ve begun to understand how you think and what you want. That means I can see through your eyes, too, instead of only my own, and it’s as if the entire universe expanded, grew larger and more beautiful.” He pauses. “You even make me think in metaphors.”

  “Abel—” Noemi has to reply, but how can she?

  “It’s all right. I know you don’t love me back. It doesn’t matter. Feeling whatever I feel for you—love, or as close as I can come to it—that has made me more human than anything else. You believed in my soul before I did, but I understand now, don’t you see? That’s what fought Mansfield. That’s the part of me that loves you.” Abel raises his hand, maybe to take hers, but then he seems to think better of it. Instead he gets to his feet. Noemi can only sit there, leaning against the fighter, looking up at him as he says, “Because of you, I’ve had adventures on every world of the Loop. I’ve made my first real friends. I broke free from Mansfield, and I found out what it would mean to love someone. Because of you, I’ve been truly alive. And now that I’ve lived, I can be ready to die for something I believe in and the person I love.”

  There’s no answer she can give him. Nothing worthy of what he’s said—or who he’s become. What would be most true, most meaningful to him? The first thing Noemi comes up with is “You are… so much more than your creator.”

  “I’m more than he made me to be, yes.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You’re more than him. More human.”

  Abel looks rueful for a moment. “Which in some measure testifies to his genius. At least no one else will ever know it.” Then he glances down at the Queen, which still lies in the pilot’s seat with no more presence than a bundle of rags. “I’ll need to prepare for my own launch. I should begin by jettisoning the Queen model. Unless you think Genesis would find her useful for instructional purposes?”

  Numbly, she shakes her head no. “No. Earth—they send the Queens and Charlies through a few times a month. We can get all the broken mechs we need.”

  He nods, brisk and efficient again. “After I’ve cycled the air lock to dispose of her, I can ready the fighter again for takeoff. It will only be a small matter of adjusting whatever elements are disturbed by the cycle. I can be under way within the half hour.”

  “Give me a few minutes,” Noemi pleads. She needs to think this through—no. She needs to pray. “You don’t do this without me.”

  “If you prefer—”

  “Promise me.” Her mind floods with nightmare images of watching the fighter swoop away, Abel leaving forever without saying good-bye. “You have to promise.”

  Abel looks confused. “Then I promise.”

  “Thank you.”

  Noemi rises on wobbly legs that don’t want to hold her up and walks
out of the docking bay. Where should she go? Holing up in her room feels cowardly. Going to the bridge would be like pretending this isn’t even happening.

  Slowly she walks the spiral corridor, around and around, remembering some of the meditation mazes on Genesis, the endless hedges through which you can wander, pray, and find your own path. Finally she reaches the sick bay door, but doesn’t go inside.

  Right here, on this spot, she fought Abel for her life. And right here, he offered his service to her. She sinks down on the very spot where she sat when he gave his weapon to her, closes her eyes, and begins to pray for guidance.

  This is where they began. Maybe that makes it the place where she can figure out how they end.

  40

  ABEL STANDS OUTSIDE THE DOCKING BAY, WATCHING THE final stages of the air lock cycle. On the screen he watches as the artificial gravity releases the space. Noemi’s fighter bobs in its mooring wires; the Queen model hangs in midair, her arms spread wide as if welcoming the void.

  Finally the silver plates of the door spiral open. The air rushes out faster than even Abel can see. In one instant the Queen is there, suspended. In the next she’s gone, lost forever in the dark. He looks at Noemi’s fighter, rattling in its wires, and wonders what it will be like to be inside it. For all his experiences and expertise, he’s never actually piloted a ship like this.

  One more unique experience he’ll have before he dies.

  The prospect of nonexistence can paralyze humans with dread. As courageously as Noemi faced the Masada Run, he saw the despair in her eyes. Abel, on the other hand, doesn’t feel the same disappointment he did at the beginning of their journey, when he first thought Noemi would space him.

  It isn’t as hard to leave life behind, he thinks, once you’ve had a life worth living.

  Maybe he should send a message to Mansfield, telling him that. It might help his creator face his own imminent death. Abel may not need to be with Mansfield any longer, but elements of his programming still feel that need—to try to help.

  Noemi isn’t the first person Abel ever loved. That was Mansfield. He didn’t only possess Abel’s manufactured loyalty, but the real love of a would-be son. Yet he chose to throw that love away rather than die, even after a long life rich in creative and professional success. Now that Abel is making the opposite choice, he understands just how much luckier he is than his creator. How more alive he is, for all Burton Mansfield’s flesh and blood.

  Sending a message to Earth is impossible anyway. Abel lets go of the thought more easily than he would’ve expected.

  The air lock finishes its cycle as its door spirals shut again. Gravity returns, and he watches the fighter settle back onto the mesh floor. There’s no reason to delay further.

  No objective reason, that is. Noemi asked him to give her time. Best if she’s the one to contact him.

  She may not love him, but she cares. His death will matter to her. Surely it’s wrong to welcome that—to want Noemi to suffer any pain whatsoever—but even the most hopeless love must be a little selfish, because Abel finds he wants to be remembered. He wants to be missed. Not too badly, not forever. And yet.

  Now he has time to kill. Abel smiles slightly at the dark pun. What should he do? The nameless ship can take Noemi back home, so there’s no need for repairs. He’d like to watch Casablanca again, but he suspects Noemi won’t need that long to pull herself together, and making her wait while he finishes the film would be cruel.

  (Leaving in the middle is too appalling to consider.)

  Abel decides to let his instincts guide him, since it turns out he has them. First he’s wandering aimlessly up the spiral corridor, looking at nothing in particular, and then he finds himself standing in front of the equipment pod bay doors.

  His jail cell for thirty years. His home. Despite all the years he spent wishing to escape, he realizes he needs to tell this place good-bye.

  After he steps through the door, Abel even works with the controls to release this area from the ship’s artificial gravity. When his feet drift off the floor, the familiarity of it makes him smile. Before he drifts too far upward, he turns off the lights, too, to make the re-creation almost complete.

  He pushes off from the wall, propelling himself toward one of the small side windows. Through this one he watched that last battle near the Genesis Gate and saw Noemi’s fighter approaching for the first time. Even then he’d known she would set him free. He just hadn’t known in how many ways that would be true.

  “Abel?”

  Glancing down, he sees Noemi standing in the doorway, on the edge of the artificial gravity well. Her face is in shadow, but his sharp vision reveals that she’s regained her calm. Good. It hurt to see her looking so lost. He says, “I wanted to be here one last time. Is that strange?”

  She shakes her head no.

  Then Noemi steps through, and the lack of gravity buoys her up. Although her hair is held in place by the padded headband she wears in front, the strands in the back fan out behind her. She spreads her arms wide as she bobs into the center of the pod bay and looks up at him. “Will you show it to me?”

  In the literal sense, Abel could show her nothing she can’t already see. But among the many gifts she’s given him is the ability to glimpse what lies beyond the literal.

  So he propels himself down to her, not too fast. The newly applicable laws of physics mean that he bumps into her back anyway, but not too hard. He catches her around the midsection as they drift toward the far wall, where she braces them with her hand.

  “There.” He points, leaning his head close to hers so she’ll see exactly what he’s seeing. “The dent in the wall? I made that when I tried to punch through to the inner corridor, about two weeks after I was marooned. The attempt was unsuccessful, obviously.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yes.” That seems as irrelevant now as it did then. “Can you see the ceiling?” They’re fairly close, but it’s dark, and Noemi has to look through human eyes.

  “I think so.” Her arm covers his, where he’s wrapped it around her waist. “There’s a pattern there—”

  “Not a pattern. I made scratch marks. To count the days, using Earth measurement.” All those years ago, he’d spent a long time trying to decide whether to use Earth or Genesis days. He told himself then that calculating the Einsteinian variations for Earth dates would provide more of a mental challenge, but now he knows he wanted Burton Mansfield to understand the full measure of time he was alone. “I stopped after two thousand. It became depressing.”

  “I can’t imagine being that lonely,” she murmurs.

  Probably she can’t. Few beings could. Abel thinks this over, then says the only thing that still matters. “It helps, being here again but not alone.”

  Noemi turns to look at him, her profile silhouetted against one of the starry windows. It strikes him that she is very close, so near their faces are almost touching.

  But she knows that, so he keeps saying what he’d wanted to tell her before. “I’ve never been less lonely than I am now. With you.”

  “Same here,” Noemi says.

  She takes one of his hands as she pushes off against the wall. The momentum isn’t enough to carry them all the way across, so they slow down midway through. Noemi twists around to capture his other hand in hers, and just like that, he’s in her arms.

  Abel watches, almost disbelieving, as she brings her face to his until their lips meet.

  It’s his first kiss. Kissing turns out to be much more complicated than it looks; there are many variables to account for. So after that initial touch—exhilarating as it is—Abel ignores higher functions and once again gives in to instinct.

  This appears to be the right way to proceed. At the beginning he and Noemi are tentative with each other, brushing their lips against each other quickly, lightly, but no more—and then the kiss really begins. Noemi pulls him closer, softly bites his lower lip, then opens his mouth with her own. As the kiss deepens, as they cl
ing to each other suspended in the dark, Abel feels his response crackle throughout his body like electricity—sharp and warm at once. The better it is, the more he needs.

  So this is desire. Why do humans describe it as torment? Abel has never known anything more exhilarating than this, the sudden discovery of how much more he can want, and do, and be. He cradles the back of her head in his hand as he kisses her even more intently, hoping to give her even a shadow of the pleasure and joy she’d given him.

  He realizes this kiss is something Noemi’s doing for him. It could never happen except as good-bye. That tarnishes nothing; the knowledge only makes Abel love her more.

  When they pull apart, she frames his face with her hand. He smiles at her before turning to kiss her palm. Without another word shared between them, he knows this is the end.

  So Abel lifts one hand to the ceiling, which is close enough to touch, and propels them back to the floor, within easy reach of the gravity control. As soon as he presses it, their feet thump down harder, Noemi’s hair swings back to chin-level, and a few nuts and bolts clatter down beside them. They let go of each other at the same moment.

  “Are you ready?” he asks her.

  She lifts her chin. “Yes.”

  Together they walk back down the corridor, and they’re almost to the door before Noemi stops. “Oh, Abel—I’m so sorry—I meant to ask you to do something for me before you—before, and then I saw you in the pod bay and I—I guess I lost track.”

  He made her lose track. Maybe that means she enjoyed the kiss as much as he did. Abel’s pleased to think he did it well. “Tell me what you need.”

  “I ran a couple of sims on how to land the ship by myself, but I’ve never actually done it. You always landed it, except on Earth, and Virginia did that. After this I think I’m going to be too—” Noemi’s voice trails off. He wonders what she might’ve said. “Could you lay in an automated landing? Just to be sure?”

  Landing the ship is well within Noemi’s capabilities, but emotional upheaval can play havoc with both human skills and human confidence. So can exhaustion. Granting this small favor is more important than easing any insecurities she may have. “Of course.”