by Claudia Gray
“I’ll wait for you here,” she says, as he begins walking toward the bridge.
This is vaguely disappointing. He’d have liked to remain with her as long as possible. But she may find the extended length of their farewell difficult; his scans of certain fictional dramas suggest that humans sometimes do.
Abel even runs to the bridge, to move things along. That it takes seconds away from his remaining life doesn’t register as a concern.
As the doors open for him, he walks directly to the helm—and stops. A light is blinking on one of the consoles, signaling ship operations in progress, but nothing should be taking place.
Then he sees it’s the light for the docking bay doors.
Noemi lied. She’s leaving with the device to sacrifice herself in the Masada Run—
—to save him.
He runs from the bridge so quickly the doors barely have time to open for him. Human speed is no use to him now; there’s no one to keep up with him, no one to fool. Abel pushes to his full speed, reaching the docking bay mid-cycle.
“Noemi!” he shouts. “Noemi, don’t!”
A small image appears on the screen in front of him—Noemi’s face. She must have tied her fighter’s communications into the ship’s. Her helmet is in her lap, and he knows without having to ask that she’s taken the thermomagnetic device, too. “Are you going to tell me I can’t do this, Abel? We both know I can.”
“Don’t. The Masada Run won’t end the war. You’ll die for no reason.” As terrible as it is to think of her dying, worse is thinking of her dying without purpose. She has lived every moment with intensity and feeling. To throw her life away—
“I’m not going on the Masada Run. I’m returning to Genesis to try to stop it.” She leans back in her pilot’s seat, smiling crookedly. “They don’t know how bad things have become for Earth. They don’t know that there’s a resistance rising up on the colonies. That changes things. If they understood we might have allies, that there’s really a chance—maybe it can change everything.”
“You can’t take that chance,” he says. “Not when you know I can save your world.”
“That’s the thing, Abel. You can’t.”
“But I—”
“Genesis isn’t just where we live. It’s what we believe. A victory that comes from the sacrifice of an innocent isn’t a victory. It’s the end of us.”
“I chose this. It’s my decision.”
“You’ve only been truly alive for a couple of weeks. You’ve only just won your freedom from Mansfield. You can’t give up a life that’s never been your own.” Noemi leans closer to the camera; he can imagine her face close to his again. “From now on, you decide where you’ll go, what you’ll do—who you’ll be. But today? You’re just Mansfield’s creation, or mine. You deserve to be yourself. You have to keep going. You have to claim your own life.”
He hears what she’s saying, but he can’t take it in. All he can think about is that she’s going away, putting herself in danger when he could save her. “Please, Noemi, let me.”
She shakes her head no and somehow manages to smile. “This is my moment of grace, Abel. All those years I prayed, and nothing—but now I don’t have to believe anymore. I know. You have a soul. That makes it my job to take care of you. To protect your life like it was my own.”
“But I—” It’s his job to take care of her. How can she owe him the same duty, the same debt? Abel doesn’t understand and he can’t yet force himself to try. All he knows is that nothing has ever devastated him this way.
Arguing with her is impossible. He’d pull open the bay door if he could, but from thirty years’ hard experience, he knows he can’t. This is it. Noemi is leaving him forever.
That leaves him nothing but the truth. “It hurts more to lose you than it did to give up my own life,” he says. “Does that mean what I feel isn’t only a copy? That I do love you?”
Tears well in her eyes. “I think maybe it does.”
The air lock cycle ends. Noemi presses her hand against the screen; Abel does the same, the closest he will ever come to touching her again.
When the image changes, he lets his hand fall. The wide view of the docking bay shows him Noemi’s ship, and within it he sees her slipping on her helmet just as the outer doors open. She releases her moorings and drifts into space until she’s cleared the ship. Then she fires her engines, a burst of brilliant orange and fire, and soars toward her home.
Abel’s vision is malfunctioning. When he touches his fingers to his cheek, they find warmth and wetness. These are his first tears.
41
GENESIS. HOME.
Noemi’s fighter breaks through the atmosphere. The blackness of space releases her, and once again she’s embraced by pale-blue sky. She’s cried in this helmet too much already—the visor keeps fogging up—but tears well in her eyes again as she sees the teal-blue ocean stretching below her, and then the outline of the southern continent, the one where she was born, where she and Esther grew up together.
Her instrument panel blinks in different colors, testifying to the many computers trying to identify her. The ship’s automated fleet signal will answer them. Noemi refuses to look down, even for a moment. Nothing matters as much as drinking in the sight of the far mountains, dusky blue on the horizon. Or the beaches, breaking with white foam. Or the grain-gold fields that stretch into the distance. It’s so much more beautiful than she ever understood before.
I wish you could have seen this, Abel.
Only within the final five thousand meters of her descent does she snap back into officer mode. Blinking hard, she focuses on her instruments, zeroing in on her home base. When the comms crackle into life, she takes a deep breath. “Ensign Noemi Vidal requesting clearance to land. Authorization code 81107.”
A pause follows, long enough for her to wonder whether they lost the signal. Then an incredulous voice says, “Ensign Noemi Vidal was reported killed in action nineteen days ago.”
“Not quite,” Noemi says. So this is what it’s like to come back from the dead. “Call Captain Yasmeen Baz. Tell her I’m reporting in, and that she has to stop the Masada Run. Do you understand? Stop the Masada Run.”
“The Masada Run has been indefinitely delayed,” says the judge, looking down at the court records, “pending the outcome of this case and the assessment of Ensign Vidal’s testimony.”
Delayed isn’t as good as canceled. But it’s as much as Noemi can manage now, while she’s under arrest, and on trial.
She sits in a simple chair in the middle of a round room. Like many buildings on Genesis, this hall of justice has been built to echo the structures of Earth’s classical past—lit by the sun, cooled by shade and breeze, and ominous through the sheer power of stone. Long shafts of sunset light stream in via the tall, narrow arched windows, illuminating the raised semicircular bench from which her three judges peer down. They allowed her to put on her dress uniform for this, crisp and dark green; wearing it has always made her feel strong. She needs every ounce of strength she can muster.
Abel never asked Noemi about the legal system on Genesis, for which she was guiltily grateful. This is the controversial topic that ignites arguments, destroys harmony, and keeps regional boundaries stiffly in place. Some faiths believe in justice, others in mercy; the Elder Council has never found a universally satisfying way to unify these two ideals. Although some faiths once advocated for executions, the planet has forbidden the death penalty by unanimous agreement. Beyond that one guarantee, punishments for crimes vary widely among the region-states.
Noemi’s home favors mercy, as does the Second Catholic Church. In her heart, though, she’s always longed for justice: hard, swift, certain, and severe. She’s been willing to deal out that harsh justice—and now she’s equally willing to endure it.
Because desertion of duty is a military crime, and the military has little use for mercy.
There are other crimes, too. “Failure to report the injury of a fellow so
ldier,” intones Commander Kaminski, battalion leader and, now, her prosecutor. “Failure to report the death of a fellow soldier.”
She thinks of Esther and winces. They haven’t let her talk to the Gatsons yet, or to Jemuel. She wants so badly to tell them how courageously Esther died, and how her resting place is at the heart of a star. Will she ever get her chance to explain? If she does, will Esther’s loved ones believe her?
Kaminski continues, “Failure to follow orders in battle.”
“I object,” says Captain Baz. She’s Noemi’s defender as a matter of law, but she seems to really care, to be fighting for her with true dedication. Noemi hopes so, anyway, because Baz is pretty much her only hope. “Officer Vidal’s actions were well within her discretion as an officer—”
“Up until a point.” Kaminski’s thin smile is more forbidding than any scowl could be. “Which point, do you think, Captain Baz? When she decided to board an enemy spacecraft? When she failed to deactivate an enemy mech, despite having the ability to do so? Where does that cross the line?”
“You’re assuming this story is true,” says one of the judges, raising an eyebrow. “We’re supposed to believe this girl became the first person in thirty years to pass through the Kismet Gate? That she crossed paths with Burton Mansfield himself?”
Captain Baz thumps her lectern for attention. Her dress uniform looks strange on her—too stiff, too confining. Baz was born for exosuits and armor, not this stuff. But she’s fighting the legal battle as vigorously as she’d fight with her blaster. “Analyzing satellite data showed that a small ship passed through the Kismet Gate around the time Ensign Vidal says—”
Another judge, his voice deep and booming, interjects, “If the story is true, Vidal’s behavior is even more egregious! She claims to know how to destroy a Gate, to have possessed the technology to do so, and yet failed to do it! By her account, she has left this world exposed to conquest for the sake of a mere mech.”
Noemi can imagine Abel’s crisp, superior voice, speaking with thinly veiled huffiness: A “mere” mech? He’d be so offended that it would be fun to watch him at it. Her memories of him warm her voice as she says, “He’s more than a machine.”
Kaminski shakes his head in open contempt. His dress uniform suits him better than Captain Baz; this is a guy who takes down his enemies not with weapons, but with words. “What was it you put in your report? Ah, yes. The mech ‘has a soul.’” The glance he gives the judges is amused, inviting them to join in his mockery. “The only question is whether that’s sentimentality… or heresy.”
“We don’t prosecute heresy in this courtroom!” Baz is beside herself. “Can we stick to the facts at issue?”
“Ensign Vidal says the mech’s soul is a fact. One that kept her from taking action to save this world—the very action she claims to have abandoned her post to fulfill—so I’d say that’s at issue, wouldn’t you?” Commander Kaminski folds his arms.
Noemi can’t take any more. “We’re not here to talk about Abel!”
Captain Baz seizes on this. “That’s right. We’re here to talk about you.”
“No, we aren’t.” Noemi gives her captain an apologetic look. As much as she appreciates the defense, it’s so far beside the point. “What happens to me doesn’t matter. It never did. The only thing that matters is stopping the Masada Run, forever.”
Kaminski stares at her with his icy blue eyes. He was one of the command leaders who devised the Masada Run strategy, and apparently he’s egotistical enough to see this as her attacking him. “You cost Genesis one attempt at salvation, and now you want to rob it of another?”
“It’s not our salvation! The Masada Run stalls Earth at best, maybe not even for very long. It’s not some epic noble stand. It’s futile. It’s useless. We only turned to that strategy because we didn’t have any other options, or we thought we didn’t. But now that I’ve traveled the Loop and seen what’s going on out there—what’s happening on Earth—I know they’re not as strong as we thought. And we have allies out there. On Kismet, on Stronghold, even on Earth itself. Maybe Cray, even. If we can get through the Genesis Gate, spread our message, we don’t have to stand alone!” Her voice is shaking now. Noemi stops herself and takes a deep breath before she finishes. “I’m willing to give my life for Genesis. All your pilots are. But shouldn’t that sacrifice be worth something? We deserve a better fight.”
“Soldiers are meant to defend this world!” Kaminski shouts. “Not to demand what they think they ‘deserve’ from it.”
Noemi wonders if her chair is bolted to the floor. Probably so. That means she can’t just get up and throw it at him. Words will have to do. “We are this world. Its next generation. If you’re not trying to save us, then what exactly are you trying to save?”
A deep voice from the back of the room says, “A good question.”
The sensors recognize the shift from day to night and turn on the artificial lights, bathing the courtroom in brightness just as everyone turns to see who’s walked in. Noemi thought she recognized the voice, but still can’t believe it when she sees the figure walking in, dressed in the white-edged robes of the Elder Council.
“Darius Akide,” says the chief judge, whose power is irrelevant next to that of one of the five individuals who lead the entire planet of Genesis. “You honor us with your presence. We… did not expect the elders to take an interest in the case.”
Akide steps closer, a rueful smile on his face. “You didn’t think we’d be interested in the first citizen of Genesis to leave this star system in three decades? How incurious you must think us.”
“She claims to have left this star system.” Kaminski can’t mouth off at one of the elders, but his disdain for Noemi remains clear. “Since the ship she says she traveled in has conveniently disappeared, we can’t prove or disprove her word.”
“You think machines have all the answers? Sounds like Earth thinking to me.” Akide comes to stand beside Noemi’s chair. He’s not a tall man, but right now he seems like a giant. “Sometimes we need to search for truth within, quite literally. Ensign Vidal’s report said that on Stronghold she was identified as a citizen of Genesis through medical examinations. So we examined the routine tests she was given upon her return to see if the reverse could be proved as well. Lo and behold, we found traces of antiviral medications that haven’t been used on Genesis in decades, as well as one previously unknown to us. Also toxins in her blood… not dangerously high levels, but high enough to suggest that she’s been breathing air more polluted than Genesis’s has ever been. If you believe Vidal didn’t travel to these other worlds, Commander Kaminski, how can you account for these test results?”
Kaminski looks like he’d gladly swallow his tongue. Captain Baz grins, a more open smile than any she’s shown since Noemi’s return. Until this instant, Noemi hadn’t realized that Baz had her doubts. But she fought like hell for Noemi anyway. The fighting takes away any sting the doubt might have caused.
The chief judge manages to say, “We will of course take all the findings into account in our proceedings—”
“These proceedings are over.” Darius Akide takes one step forward, more forceful than any of the judges up high behind their bench. “The Elder Council doesn’t interfere often in justice proceedings. Almost never, in fact. But we have that right, and we’re exercising it today. By decree of the Council, the Masada Run is hereby postponed until future notice. The Council, not the military, will decide if or when that run ever takes place. Furthermore, Ensign Noemi Vidal is cleared of all charges and reinstated at the rank of lieutenant.”
“A promotion?” Kaminski realizes he’s said that out loud a moment too late.
“This girl has brought us the only intel on Earth and the other colony worlds that we’ve had in three decades,” Akide replies, letting them all hear the steel within his voice. “More than that, she’s described a way to destroy a Gate—a way that’s no longer useful to us, but one that might spur our own scientis
ts to come up with new theories of their own. I’d say a promotion was the least we owed her.”
“I agree,” Captain Baz says. “Congratulations, Lieutenant.”
It ought to feel like the most exhilarating victory possible. Instead it feels… well, okay, pretty good, but this doesn’t solve everything. The Masada Run might not be canceled for good. The war isn’t won. And this doesn’t bring Esther back.
Gratitude, Noemi reminds herself. When she smiles a moment later, she means it.
The judges don’t seem to know quite what to do. One of them starts gathering her tabulator and belongings; another becomes suddenly interested in smoothing out his robe. However, the head judge holds it together. “Lieutenant Vidal, you are hereby freed to return to duty.”
Noemi gets to her feet, only to have Akide’s hand close firmly over her shoulder. “Actually, she has a new assignment—advising the Council about what she’s seen on her journey through the Loop. We read her debrief, of course, but there’s much more to learn, I think.” He looks her in the face then, for the first time, and misinterprets the dismay he must see there. “The assignment’s only temporary, Vidal. We wouldn’t keep you from flying forever.”
“Thank you, sir.” But really, inside her head, she’s thinking only, Me, advise the Council? Noemi had braced herself for disgrace, even for time in jail. But this is something else completely, unexpected and intimidating. As she takes in the cold fury on Kaminski’s face, the way his fingers curl around the edges of his lectern as if it’s a neck he can wring, she realizes it might be dangerous, too.
With the Council by her side, though, she might be able to change things—to get another, truer chance to save Genesis.
Afterward, Noemi expects to be swept someplace very grand, very secret, or both. Maybe to a meeting of the entire Elder Council, or some secret archive where sensitive information is kept. Instead Darius Akide walks with her by the riverside, in full sight of countless passersby. This is her public vindication, then: quiet and uneventful. Noemi isn’t sure whether she likes that or not.
