by Claudia Gray
Eyes blurring with tears, Noemi drops her head in shame.
Virginia paces the length of the bay, hands fisted in her long, red-streaked hair, so tense it seems she could shatter with any step. “Back when we first met seven months ago, you guys showed up on Cray and needed our help. We gave it to you. You needed me to help break Robot Boy out of prison, which could’ve put me in prison, too, or even gotten me killed. I did it anyway. Helped Abel hack into Mansfield Cybernetics corporate secrets, even though I had bad dreams about freakin’ warrior mechs crashing into my bedroom at night for solid months after that. Went all the way through an unknown Gate to a mystery world. Went to Genesis to help you guys win a war—a war against the planet I was born on! I did all of this, rescued you two over and over and over, and I never asked for anything until now, and instead you ruined my friends’ lives.”
There’s no way to counter this, because every word is true. Without Virginia Redbird, Noemi knows she and Abel wouldn’t have gotten very far. “I screwed it up. All of it. Not just the towline—from the very beginning—”
Virginia snaps, “Stop with the self-pity. It’s not going to make me less angry with you.”
That stings. Noemi didn’t say any of that to somehow get herself off the hook; she knows how badly she’s messed up. But that’s not what Virginia needs to hear. “I just meant—if I could do it differently, I would. And I know you would, too.”
Virginia stops pacing, sighs deeply, and slumps against the nearby Smasher as though it were a wall. “No, I wouldn’t. Wish I could say that was because I’d never leave people in trouble behind. The truth is… all this running around, breaking the law, it made me feel important. Special. On a planet where everyone’s a genius, ‘special’ is kind of hard to come by. But working with the famous Model One A? Going on secret missions with a soldier from Genesis? That proved I was smarter than anyone. I wanted to be forever captain.” She closes her eyes, like she doesn’t even want to see anymore. “And I’m jerk enough to do all that over again, just like before. Except this time I wouldn’t bring my friends into it. I’d keep them safe. Nobody’s neck would be on the line but mine.”
What would I do over? Noemi wonders. She couldn’t not volunteer for the Masada Run. Couldn’t let Esther die without trying to rescue her, couldn’t leave Abel trapped and alone in his ship. All along, she’s done her absolute best. Fought as hard as she knew how. So many terrible things have happened that it seems like there ought to be some action she’d change, something she’d do or wouldn’t do—but she can’t think of it. The past seven months of her life, she thought she was choosing her own course. Instead, she was locked into an autopilot that has steered her to this.
The ship shudders, and she remembers that they still have to escape from Cray. More correctly, Abel is trying to escape, taking them with him, and she draws comfort from that. Her military instincts tell her to go to the bridge, but what could she do? Either Abel and the engines can handle it or they’ll all die.
Virginia sniffles, and her voice is hoarse as she says, “Oh. By the way—”
Noemi steels herself for the next accusation. Probably she deserves this one, too. “Yeah?”
“Congrats on not being dead.” This time, when their eyes meet, Virginia manages a watery smile. “So they did it, huh? Figured out how to put mech systems in a human body? You’re going to be in every cybernetics course from now on, you know.”
“Great,” Noemi says wearily. “Just great.”
“I need to congratulate Abel, too. When last I looked in on our heroes, you were in cryosleep and Abel was headed to Haven to strike a really terrible bargain, if he couldn’t find any other way out of it.” Virginia shudders at the thought of another friend in danger. “But it looks like he managed to get away again.”
“Actually, I’m the one who got us out of there. I wasn’t going to leave him behind.” Noemi gestures toward her close-shorn hair; the pale white edges of some incisions are still slightly visible at her hairline. “But yeah. They figured out how to make me… well, half mech.”
Apparently the only thing that can distract Virginia from grief is brand-new technology, like the stuff woven through Noemi’s blood and bone. She sounds slightly less miserable as she asks, “You’re a hybrid now, right? Part mech, part human? Because that is mega, super, colossal badass.”
“It doesn’t feel that way,” Noemi admits. “Not always. Sometimes it feels like my own body doesn’t belong to me anymore. Like my brain is split in two and I don’t know which half to listen to. I know I’ll get the hang of it—I can even see how it’s going to be great—but I can’t take back what just happened. I’m stronger than I was, not mech strong but, still, more, and I didn’t realize how hard I’d yanked the towline until it broke, and—” And Ludwig and Fon were lost.
Silence stretches between them again, long enough for Noemi to figure that Abel must’ve gotten the ship out of trouble. Otherwise they’d be dead by now.
“Listen,” Virginia says. “I get that being part mech has to be the weirdest weird in Weirdtown. It’s weirdness I hope to study in depth as soon as we’re not running for our lives. But you’re here and you’re alive, and I’m not in the mood to be sorry that at least some of my friends are still here with me. Okay?” Despite what is clearly her best effort, her eyes well with tears, and Virginia begins to cry.
“Okay.” Noemi gathers Virginia into a tight hug. That’s all she can do.
Virginia turns out to have stayed up most of the previous forty hours, worrying about whether she and her friends would get caught.
“First they tried to dig into our Razer data,” she says as Noemi leads her through the Persephone’s spiral corridor. “We’d set up a fake layer of info for them to tap into, so we dodged that bullet, but we knew the authorities weren’t going to stop there. Everyone on Cray was totally paranoid—like, they thought Earth was invincible, that we made Earth invincible, and then the Battle of Genesis proved otherwise. Some people thought Earth would punish us, and other people were sure it could only be sabotage, and overnight we went from this whole planet of happy nerds to a place where nobody trusted anybody anymore.”
Fascinating as this is, Noemi can hardly take it in. She’s too worried about Virginia. “You need to sleep.”
“How am I supposed to sleep?”
“With a sedative.”
Virginia sighs. “Yeah, that oughta do it.”
The sedatives in the ship’s stores are applied via patch. Noemi peels one and sticks it on the inside of Virginia’s wrist, where blood vessels are close to the skin, so it will take effect faster. Even as they leave sick bay, Virginia is already swaying on her feet, and Noemi has to steady her. This task can’t distract her from the slightly odd vibration she feels through the floor. Maybe a human would miss it, but her mech senses won’t let her tune it out.
The Persephone can’t put off repairs much longer, or they’ll wind up dead in space.
Maybe Abel thinks that’s a viable option, Noemi muses as she watches Virginia groggily stumble into her bunk. He spent thirty years waiting to get picked up last time. He was bored and lonely, but not in danger. Not even uncomfortable. Does he think she ought to be able to handle that, now that she’s half mech?
It’s impossible, she thinks, walking back down the corridor. Even if my body can take it, my mind can’t. There would be nothing to see, nothing to do. Abel would be my whole world.
Noemi pauses, putting her hand to her mouth as she remembers their first kiss. They had been in the pod where he’d been marooned, floating in zero-G just like he had for those thirty years. Then she thinks of the hours they recently spent curled up in a bunk together, kissing so many times she lost count, until she felt giddy and happy and spent.
Having Abel as her whole world might not be all bad.…
Still, she’d rather choose on her own terms when she and Abel tune out the rest of the galaxy. If the Persephone breaks down, there’s no telling when they’
d be found, or by whom.
Will they ever get a chance to learn what they could be to each other? Or will they always be hunted, in constant danger, on the run?
Sometimes Noemi feels like she’s been running forever.
When they reach the Cray Gate several hours later, Noemi’s at navigation and Abel’s at ops when the doors slide open. Virginia wanders in, wearing a pair of pajamas—bright blue, with tiny pineapples patterned across the fabric.
In reply to their questioning looks, Virginia says, “I found them in one of the abandoned crew lockers. Don’t give me that look, okay? I need all the comfort I can get right now.”
The joke is too raw; Virginia’s pain is too new. Noemi tries to play along, though, holding up her hands in surrender. “No argument here.”
“Personally, I think they’re pretty sexy stuff.” Virginia turns, modeling the oversize, gaudy things as though they were high fashion. “Maybe I’ll set a trend.”
“Pineapple pajamas will sweep the whole galaxy,” Noemi agrees. Abel seems at a loss as to how to play along, so she gives him a more pragmatic topic of conversation. “How many hours until we reach Kismet?”
Before Abel can answer, sensors begin beeping. Virginia peers down at the ops console and says, “Oh, yay, another war fleet! Today is turning out so well.”
“Damocles ships?” Noemi looks down at her controls in alarm—but the Earth patrols are centered around one particular area of the system, fairly far away.
“No Damocles. This war fleet is ours,” Abel says.
The viewscreen zeroes in on the distant signals to reveal Vagabond vessels—and among them is the Katara. Noemi breathes out in relief. “They made it.”
“Who made it?” Virginia squints. “Wait, that’s the Krall Consortium flagship, right? What is this, some kind of space party?”
“We’ll explain shortly.” Abel opens communications. “This is the free ship Persephone, to the Vagabond fleet, calling any officer authorized to make contact.”
In only seconds, the viewscreen changes from a starfield to the face of Dagmar Krall, one eyebrow raised. “I do recognize you and your ship, you know. It’s only been a few hours! Besides, I don’t meet with fully sentient mechs every day.”
“Now you get two for the price of one,” Virginia mutters, too low for anyone but Noemi to overhear.
“I would imagine you meet with sentient mechs about as often as I meet with the leader of the largest Vagabond trading group in the galaxy. Which is to say, exactly as much, as we are the only two individuals who fully meet those descriptions,” Abel replies.
Noemi smiles. Abel’s not great at banter yet, but apparently he’s trying.
He continues, “We’re very glad to see you. Although we intend to help you as discussed, our engines have reached a critical state of disrepair. We need parts we don’t have—”
“But we probably do.” Krall is already nodding. “Send the specs over, and we’ll set up a transfer immediately.”
“Thank you,” Abel says. He’s visibly relieved—a rarity for him. He must’ve been even more worried than Noemi had realized.
Krall replies, “No thanks necessary. Genesis is the Consortium’s single most important ally. You’re working to help Genesis win the war. That means we need to repair your ship as much as we’d need to repair our own.”
As soon as comms go silent, Virginia says, “Anybody else wondering if this makes us pirates, too?”
“Like she said, it’s for Genesis,” Noemi says. Already she feels encouraged again. Dagmar Krall is a ruthless woman, and her Consortium is as likely to be involved in piracy as it is in free trading. But Krall takes her allegiance to Genesis seriously, and has already fought a fierce battle for their freedom. She’s playing a key role in the Bellum Sanctum strategy, and the best help and protection they could’ve found.
The Persephone is once again a ship on a mission, and Noemi is once again a soldier with purpose.
16
TRUE TO HER WORD, DAGMAR KRALL PROVIDES THE necessary repair parts within minutes. Instead of merely sending over an equipment pod, a simple corsair comes over, piloted by Krall’s most trusted lieutenant, who also happens to be her wife. Anjuli Patil hasn’t come here only as a favor, however; she’s also tasked with briefing them on the mission.
“Not even I’m privy to all the details,” Anjuli says as she hands Abel his next repair tool. She’s perched on a corner console in the engine room, wearing a gold sari, dark red tattoos along her arms, and an easy smile. “But as I understand it, the Bellum Sanctum device has been kept undercover in a base on one of the moons of Genesis. Which—you know, I wouldn’t have thought you guys even had a lunar base, what with being so anti-technology and all—”
“We do have a space fleet,” Noemi says dryly.
“Yeah, you’re no Luddites,” Virginia says from her place on the floor; she’s lying on her back beneath one of the mag field generators, only her feet visible as she assists with repairs. “You’ve got a space fleet—one made up of decades-old ships, run from government buildings that don’t even use artificial light during the day—”
“We’re not against technology in and of itself,” Noemi insists. “Just its overuse.”
Abel points out, “To be fair, ‘overuse’ is a term that can be interpreted many different ways.” The look Noemi gives him suggests that he should let her handle the rest of this conversation.
For her part, Anjuli is undaunted. “Well, it’s a massive electromagnetic device that ought to have the power to scramble pretty much all communications, planetwide, for as long as it’s functioning. If we can protect that device, it could function for years. If Earth can’t talk to the colony worlds—if they can’t talk to their ships, or give orders to the Damocles—that will bring them to their knees, almost instantly.”
“Very likely,” Abel agrees. It strikes him as odd that a “masterstroke weapon” would be so benign, something that might take no lives whatsoever. But if any planet were to create such a weapon, it would be Genesis. Mostly he’s reassured that the full plan has finally been revealed to them. His earlier suspicion of Dagmar Krall appears to have no merit.
“As you can imagine,” Anjuli adds, “the Bellum Sanctum device requires a massive engine—one in better repair than Genesis has.”
Noemi stands in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. “When you say big… how big?”
Anjuli takes a deep breath. “We’re here to steal one of the minefield generator engines.”
Up until this point, Virginia has been on her back so deep beneath the engine workings that Abel can only see her legs from the knee down. Now she rolls out on her hover platform with wide eyes. “Excuse me? Tell me you didn’t just say what I think you said.”
Abel understands her astonishment. Already his mind is unfolding the various scenarios for this engine’s location and retrieval; all of them are, at best, extremely challenging.
“I don’t understand,” Noemi says. “The mines are magnetic. They work together to power the entire minefield grid. They don’t need an overall generator engine.”
Anjuli answers even before Abel can. “They don’t any longer, no—but they once did. Magnetic minefields are easy to maintain, but difficult to set up. There’s a period of weeks or months when the mines are being deployed, but the master grid isn’t yet activated, which means—”
“That the mines would just blow each other up,” Noemi concludes. Abel is pleased at this evidence that she’s listening more readily to her data implant. “It’s like… like you need a framework for them to hold on to, before the minefield is complete.”
Nodding, he says, “Generating such a framework would require extremely large amounts of energy.”
“Huge. Enormous. Gigantic.” Virginia’s eyes are round. “That thing’s not just floating around in space, is it?”
Anjuli beams, as though they were discussing a far more cheerful subject. “Of course not! It’s located on the outermost p
lanetoid of the Kismet system—a ball of frozen rock, devoid of any useful minerals, totally deserted. The engine was buried deep, with extremely strong automatic security that’s still up and running.”
“How do you know?” Virginia says. “That was a generation ago. Security could’ve broken down by now.”
Until this, Anjuli Patil has seemed like one of those humans whose good mood is constant and self-perpetuating; the laugh lines on her face seem to confirm this. Now, however, her smile falters. “Genesis leadership sent us to investigate almost immediately after the Battle of Genesis. Three people made separate attempts to enter. None of them survived.”
Noemi crosses herself, but is too much of a soldier to remain stricken. “Let me guess—this security is something only an advanced mech could get through?”
Anjuli shrugs. “Maybe some incredibly talented human somewhere could pull it off. But how many more people have to get killed trying? Besides, the real challenge is what happens when the engine gets turned on.”
“Vibrational effects,” Abel says. His memory banks have little detailed information about such engines, but enough for him to have extrapolated the likely problems. “Such engines have a stabilizer field, but it doesn’t take hold until three seconds after ignition. Until then, the full vibration of the engines is in effect.”
Virginia makes a face. “Big whoop. Three seconds of shaking? Doesn’t seem like a big deal.”
“The vibration levels would disorient a human to the point of losing consciousness and would cause severe concussion. The likelihood of brain injury would be over ninety-six percent.” Abel doesn’t add the decimal points, as they vary by age and size of the theoretical human involved. “This is why such engines are always activated by mechs—and even some mechs are destroyed in the process.”
