Defy the Fates

by Claudia Gray

  What she sees now should be impossible: a Damocles ship stalled, silent and helpless. Abel’s shut them down… at least for the time being. Other Earth ships will soon respond to this shutdown, but at the moment they remain in place, still operating under the protocol that one Damocles is enough to win any battle.

  That gives us a brief opening, she thinks. We shouldn’t waste it.

  “Nobody’s ever stopped a Damocles before,” she says to Abel. Virginia’s stepped out, so they’re alone on the bridge. He listens to her quietly, patiently. Has anyone else ever listened to her the way he does? “Not like this. They’re supposed to be invulnerable, but that’s impossible. Any machine can break.”

  She half expects Abel to protest that he couldn’t, but he remains focused. “Your reasoning is sound. In point of fact, I believe Damocles ships may be designed to be broken—when it is desirable for them to break.”

  That makes Noemi wrinkle her nose. “Desirable for them to break?” Then it hits her. “In case of capture—or boarding—there would have to be a self-destruct.”

  He nods. “My memory banks include no plans or specifications for Damocles ships, but it is rational to assume that some kind of self-destruct or singular override exists. Earth’s military strategists have always been keenly aware that an exceptionally talented opponent might develop a way to ‘hack’ the Queens and Charlies, essentially switching the side the mechs were fighting for in the middle of a battle.”

  “That’s close to what you did at the Battle of Genesis, right?” Noemi says.

  “Close, but not exactly. There I turned the mechs against each other.”

  “Has anyone ever pulled that off?”

  “No,” Abel replies, dashing that particular hope before Noemi had even fully imagined it. But he continues, “It is even possible one Damocles’s self-destruction might trigger others, to prevent the hacking of multiple ships.”

  The possibilities seem to light up Noemi’s mind. “You mean, they’re interconnected? We could maybe take out more than one Damocles at the same time?”

  Abel nods. “If they were close enough to be in communication with each other… possibly.”

  Dagmar Krall’s voice comes through the speakers again. “We’ve come up with a plan. One of our transports is critically damaged. The crew’s already evacuating. Once that’s done, we could program its autopilot to fly straight into the Damocles. The resulting explosion ought to take the Damocles out.”

  “That plan has an excellent chance of success,” Abel says.

  Noemi stifles a laugh. Whenever a human has a good idea, she thinks, he acts so surprised.

  But this time, another human has an even better idea. “Commodore Krall,” Noemi says, “I’d like to hold off on your plan for a while.”

  Krall sounds annoyed. “I thought you guys said that thing would wake up again soon.”

  “It will,” Noemi says, “but while it’s in dormant mode, we have an incredible opportunity. Nobody outside of Earth’s most elite security forces has ever boarded a Damocles vessel. Nobody human, I mean. Earth keeps it that way so nobody can know what the ships’ vulnerabilities are. If these mechs stay asleep long enough for us to get on board and run a few scans, we could do so much more than destroy this one Damocles. We might learn how to destroy them all.”

  Any senior officer in the Genesis military would’ve wanted to debate this for days. Apparently pirate queens are more adaptable. “That would be an intelligence coup,” Krall says. “Could change the whole shape of the war—but only if we have time to get in and out before the fighter mechs in this thing wake up. Do we, Abel?”

  “I cannot be sure,” he says. “With no definite data on the Damocles ship’s construction, there’s no way for me to come up with an estimate.”

  Noemi’s mech mind agrees with this, but her humanity decides to keep pushing. “There’s no reason to think we don’t have time to get over there,” she says as Virginia walks back onto the bridge. “It takes time for them to run reboot and repair cycles on fighter mechs. So the Damocles ought to stay in stasis for at least a few minutes—long enough for us to board. Right?”

  Although Abel looks like he wishes he could answer otherwise, he says, “That is correct.”

  Virginia has stopped in her tracks. In a low whisper, as if to herself, she says, “I leave the bridge for five minutes and they’re planning a field trip to a Damocles.”

  “It’s important,” Noemi says to her.

  “It had better be!” retorts Virginia.

  “Well, if we don’t know how much time we have,” Krall says, “we shouldn’t waste any more of it. I’ll send a couple of Katara crew members out in a shuttle immediately to join you.”

  “We’ll meet them there,” Noemi promises.

  Abel snaps off communications, which means he’s on board with the plan. Still, he looks uneasy. “I don’t know if I can monitor the mechs as well from an exosuit. That means I wouldn’t have any advance warning of when the Damocles will become active again.”

  “That’s why you shouldn’t go.” Noemi has always felt safer with Abel by her side. Now, however, he can protect her best from the bridge. “We need you here on the Persephone, using its sensors to monitor the situation. There’s no way I’m not getting a look inside. And, Virginia—if you’re willing to chance it, you could open up the onboard AI better than anyone.”

  “I love a mystery,” Virginia quips, but without her usual enthusiasm. Her expression is shadowed; her eyes lowered.

  Noemi thinks, She won’t take risks so casually, not after Ludwig and Fon.

  Still, that’s not the same as never taking risks again. “Sure,” Virginia says. She’s already regaining some of her bravado. “Never let it be said I missed a chance to spy on super-secret tech.”

  Abel remains disquieted—Noemi can tell—but he nods. “I can devise no logical objection to your plan.”

  “See, when you made me part mech, you lost the upper hand.”

  He’s evolved enough to know when she’s teasing. He smiles. “We shall see.”

  “Then that’s settled.” With a nod, Noemi says, “Let’s go.”

  Her courage remains strong until they get within a hundred meters of the Damocles. Noemi takes in the enormity of it—the vastness of the long, angular metal structure, the way it seems heavy even in vacuum. She’s never been this close to a Damocles before. If she had, she would’ve been killed.

  Through the speaker of her exosuit’s helmet, Noemi hears Virginia say, “Ugly mother, isn’t it?”

  “It’ll look prettier blowing up,” Noemi responds.

  She and Virginia left the Persephone in exosuits powered by thrusters, until the shuttle from the Katara snagged them via towline. They’re currently being dragged in—a routine process, and an easy one, since there’s no resistance in space. But it makes Noemi feel out of control. She hates that feeling.

  It fades as the shuttle gradually nears the Damocles. Shuttles are slowpokes, as spacecraft go: They can barely match one-fifth the speed of the Persephone. But their small size and precise handling makes them good for approaches like this.

  The Damocles side panels open upward, like wings, revealing shimmering distortion fields within. Those won’t keep them out, but they’ve always prevented any unauthorized human from looking inside.

  Until now.

  The shuttle slips through the distortion field as easily as if it were the iridescent surface of a soap bubble. Noemi blinks as the prismatic haze vanishes—pop—and reveals the interior of the Damocles.

  Her first thought is of Gothic cathedrals from Earth, the ones they studied in Galactic Civilization: a vast, dark, vaulted chamber, gray as stone. While she had expected some sort of launching bay, she hadn’t anticipated that almost the entire ship would be hollow. There’s no sign of living spaces within the ship, or anything like a bridge. Instead, she sees… racks. Long metal racks, thick and arched across the width of the ship.

  Like a rib c
age, Noemi thinks with disgust. But that’s not the worst part.

  The worst part is that the mechs hang from these racks, wearing their star-shaped exosuits folded partly around them like the wings of bats. And they’re awake. Their eyes stare out from the suits, glinting oddly in the light from the shuttle. Cat’s eyes do that. Those are the eyes of predators.

  Virginia’s seen it, too. “They’re watching us! We’re about to get—wait. Why aren’t we getting killed?”

  Noemi shakes her head. “I guess the mechs don’t fall asleep in dormant mode. They’re just… resting.” Come to think of it, as far as she knows, Abel’s the only mech in existence who truly sleeps.

  “They’re resting until the ship wakes up, which it will at any time, at which point these mechs will turn back into unstoppable killing machines,” Virginia says. “In case it wasn’t completely obvious, we need to get the hell out of here.”

  As creeped out as Noemi is, she won’t head for the door just yet. “Let’s learn what we can.”

  Turns out there’s no locking station for a shuttle or any other small craft to securely dock within a Damocles, so they have to leave their ship free-floating within. The crew members from the Katara emerge in their own exosuits, which are older even than Noemi’s, and shabby with wear. All of them are maneuvering as best they can in zero-G, which always feels a little like bobbing in unpredictable waters. But they manage to work fast, aiming scanners at every corner and cranny of the Damocles interior. Virginia spots a control panel three meters above them, one meant for humans to use while programming missions within the ship. She braces her feet against the shuttle’s hull and pushes herself upward, as if flying, to see the panel for herself.

  Noemi’s first inclination is to use her own scanner, but then she remembers that the hardware attached to her belt isn’t nearly as badass as the hardware inside her head.

  Trust it, she tells herself. Give it a try.

  So she takes a deep breath and tries to silence her thoughts like she would in meditation. Normally that doesn’t go very well. This time, however, when she quiets her mind, another voice is waiting.

  Diameter of ship, twenty-eight meters. Length, forty-seven meters. Width, twenty-two meters. Probable alloy of hull—

  The information pours into her, like water into a glass. Noemi originally found this eerie—and she still does—but she also sees the wonder of it. The beauty. Numbers aren’t just numbers any longer; they’re knowledge. The information glitters inside her mind like the facets of a jewel, dazzling her until she feels her throat tighten.

  Is this what it’s like inside Abel’s head? If so, his universe is so much more beautiful than she ever imagined.

  Don’t cry in zero-G, she reminds herself. Tears and mucus floating around inside a helmet equals yuck. To collect herself, she pushes off the shuttle and soars up to where Virginia is working.

  It looks like Virginia is scowling. “How’s it going?” Noemi asks.

  “I’m not at my most dexterous wearing exosuit gloves.” Virginia holds out her hands and wiggles her fingers, which are encased in the slight puffiness of the suit. “Yeah, I’m getting some information, but I could get so much more if I could just touch the damned thing.”

  “We’ll be able to learn more from scans.” The richness of the data inside Noemi’s head still staggers her. From this she could fashion a nearly complete blueprint of an entire Damocles. In fact, the rush of information is making her dizzy, almost nauseated—but she figures she’ll be able to overcome that, given time.

  Virginia remains preoccupied by more immediate problems. “Are the mechs looking at us? I think they’re looking at us.”

  Noemi allows her brain to compensate for the low light within; the mechs seem to sharpen. Row after row of Queens and Charlies stare at the intruders, watching them intently, waiting for activation that could come at any moment. She says only, “How much more time do you think you’ll need to go through the available data?”

  “I’m working! This looks promising—” Virginia wraps her legs around the pole of the control panel, allowing her to work with both hands at once.

  “Promising?”

  “Remember how you were talking about a fail-safe? Some kind of self-destruct?”

  Fresh hope sparks within Noemi. “You found one?”

  “Let me take a look. The trick is to make sure that’s what it is without, you know, getting it started.”

  Virginia stabs at the control panel one more time, and the screen flashes red with warning. Noemi lights up. “You found it?”

  “Yeah.” Virginia looks over at Noemi, wide-eyed. “Unfortunately, I activated it.”

  It’s as if the chill of absolute zero had penetrated Noemi’s jumpsuit to freeze her to the marrow. “The Damocles is going to blow?”

  “In about five minutes,” Virginia says weakly. “Can we get ourselves out of explosion range that fast?”

  The intelligence inside Noemi’s head knows exactly how fast a shuttle can fly, which means she can’t deny the hard, instant truth: No. They can’t.

  18

  ON THE PERSEPHONE BRIDGE, SENSORS GLARE ORANGE. Abel swiftly checks energy readouts, locates the rapidly increasing radiation levels, and realizes what’s happening to the Damocles, even before Noemi’s voice comes over the speakers: “We’re in trouble.”

  He does the calculations in 0.041 seconds. “I’m on my way.”

  “Abel, no! You’ll only get yourself—”

  Static swallows the sounds of her voice, a by-product of the radiation emanating from the Damocles. He’ll pretend he never heard it, if she tries to protest after he’s rescued her and her party.

  Because he is rescuing them.

  Although he can’t determine the precise time of detonation, an estimate can be posited based on the rate of radiation increase and a likely overload point for a vessel of this size. He doubts they have more than four minutes before the Damocles destroys itself, and a shuttle isn’t capable of flying out of range in that amount of time. There’s no chance for any more elaborate retrieval mission; the most dangerous option is the only one with any chance of working.

  He fires the engines, aims for the heart of the Damocles, and accelerates.

  Exactly how he’ll rescue Noemi and the others remains a mystery to him. Mansfield programmed Abel with a wealth of material on topics both critical and arcane, but not with the specs for a Damocles. That information was too closely guarded a secret. He can extrapolate—volume divided by estimated number of mechs transported—but he won’t know anything certain until he can see for himself, which by then will be within two minutes of detonation.

  But Noemi has been programmed, too, in a way. In the past they’ve agreed that if his Directive One is to protect and obey Burton Mansfield, hers is to protect and obey her homeworld as a soldier of Genesis. She’s been trained in military procedure since she was no more than a child; that knowledge is a part of her.

  Every rule of military procedure for a space emergency declares: Stay with your ship or get back to it as fast as you can.

  He doesn’t know what the Damocles may do, but he knows what she’ll do as surely as though he’d programmed her himself.

  Abel focuses on the controls as the Persephone zooms toward the open hatches of the Damocles, piloting into the center of one of these darkly iridescent disruptor fields. It shimmers as he passes through, no more than glints of light at the edges of his vision. He fully dilates his pupils to get the best look at the inside—

  —the glassy stares of warrior mechs meet him, feline and unnerving—

  —but he disregards that input as soon as he sights the shuttle. The Krall Consortium crew members may not be as rigorously trained as Noemi, but they know enough to scramble back inside their spacecraft. But it takes even well-trained spacefarers a while to maneuver in zero-G. Only a couple of meters above the shuttle are Noemi and Virginia, using exosuit thrusters to return to the ship as well. It won’t take them very long
, but any delay wastes time they don’t have.

  At least there appears to be no docking mechanism at work, he thinks. Detaching from such a mechanism would take seconds if not minutes. Instead, the shuttle is free to move. This is one of his only sources of encouragement, so he concentrates strongly on it.

  Abel’s personal security/preservation programming urgently signals for him to depart; this information is worthy only of immediate deletion.

  Instead, he brings the Persephone around in one large loop, one that gives Noemi the 4.1 seconds she needs to drop through the shuttle’s hatch, Virginia at her side. He doesn’t wait for the shuttle to be sealed, just accelerates toward it and activates the tractor beam.

  The small bump he feels when his ship attaches the shuttle generates relief—more than it should, given that he’s still in the heart of a Damocles that’s going to explode in roughly 29.15 seconds. (His estimate is improving as he monitors radiation gain.) It’s not much of a chance for them, but he’ll take it.

  Abel grabs the shuttle with the Persephone’s tractor beams, reeling it in closer than safety protocols suggest as he accelerates away. They hurtle into deep space again, coincidentally straight toward the Katara, but he doesn’t slow down. He has 41.48 seconds to avoid a crash with the Katara, and only 3.5 to avoid imminent destruction.

  At the last tenth of a second, he reroutes extra power to the shields, then spins his ship so that it’s between the Damocles and the shuttle. He snaps off the viewscreen—more effective than closing his eyes, and he’ll still be able to monitor sensors.

  The only thing those sensors can tell him is whether he’s going to live or die, information he’s destined to find out one way or another… and yet he must watch.

  He imagines Burton Mansfield saying, So human.

  The domed viewscreen blinks off, draping the bridge in darkness. Abel sees the sensors flare from orange to red and braces himself in his captain’s chair. The Persephone starts to shake violently, and he feels dozens of thuds of debris against the hull. If they punch through the surface, air pressure will be lost, and he’ll be sucked into space to freeze.