Defy the Fates

by Claudia Gray

  “Noemi!” Delphine cries, hurrying toward her with open arms. Noemi hugs her back, almost on autopilot. It’s not like they became close on the Osiris, exactly, but it is sort of good to see her again.

  “What are you doing out here?” Noemi asks.

  Delphine makes a face. “Getting out from under Gillian Shearer’s thumb. Trying to learn how to do something useful.” Then, to Noemi’s astonishment, she adds, “You’ve come for Abel, haven’t you?”

  “You’ve met Abel? You’ve seen him?” Noemi’s heart sinks. “How long has he been in there?”

  “I saw him early yesterday, when the Remedy ship returned. Captain Fouda and the head of the hospital did a lot of negotiating before allowing Abel through to the Winter Castle.”

  “Fouda?” Noemi says in amazement. “That son of a bitch! We saved him!”

  “I know,” Delphine says miserably. “And I don’t agree with exchanging people—even robot people—for some sort of bargain, like they’re just goods to be traded. I think it’s wrong. But I’m not the one in charge, and we need so much medicine here, and a couple of Tares aren’t working properly—excuse me, what are you doing with that medkit?”

  “Using it.” Ephraim’s gaze takes in the dozens of patients lying on cots and stretchers. “I’m a doctor, and one who knows a lot about the Cobweb protocol.”

  “A doctor?” Delphine says, almost reverently. “We need real doctors. I think we only have three of them here, and hundreds of patients.”

  The tall man who must be in charge has overheard and steps into the conversation. “Thank God we have another physician here. Anything you could do—”

  “I’m all yours the minute we get Abel out, which hopefully won’t be long.” Ephraim’s loyalty surprises and moves Noemi, and she smiles for the first time in what feels like forever. As he finishes making notes on a patient’s chart, he turns to her and asks, “So you say you know how to get into the Winter Castle?”

  Noemi looks toward the transport doors she saw last time. “Last time I got into the Winter Castle the same way the mechs got out. So if we’re going to try that, we need Shearer to send out her mechs.” She turns to the head of the hospital. “Do you think a few Vagabonds might be willing to help us rescue our friend by causing a distraction?”

  Although she expects an argument, the tall man simply inclines his head in respect. “I recognize your voice now, Vidal of Genesis. You gave us this world. Giving you a distraction in return is the least we can do.”

  Not only do they get the promise of a distraction but they also get the loan of a few snowmobiles. Once they’ve got these in position, Ephraim starts counting things off. “Okay, Harriet and Zayan, you’ll be a team. Noemi, you stick with me and Virginia—oh, holy hell, Virginia!”

  Virginia, who’s refastening her boots, looks up at him in confusion. “What?”

  “You—Harriet and Zayan, too, I think—” Ephraim’s eyes are wide. “Have you already had Cobweb? If not, Haven’s going to kill you. The entire place is toxic! Me, I had Cobweb as a kid, but if you haven’t, this is bad.”

  Harriet gasps, and Virginia puts her fingers to her throat as though to check her pulse. Noemi makes a gesture meant to communicate, Calm down, guys. “It takes two or three days for the toxicity to sink in. The Remedy fighters were fine at first. And as far as I know, the effects wear off after leaving the planet.”

  Ephraim still doesn’t look happy. “How do you guys feel?”

  “Fine, I guess?” Harriet squares her shoulders, visibly summoning courage. “It’s got to be a short stay, but that’s true regardless, right?”

  Ephraim nods reluctantly. “Okay. We break into two teams.”

  “Three,” Noemi says. She may be sick and not quite herself, but she’s still the military strategist here. “You guys should go in teams of two, because you need backup. But I’ve been here before. I can go alone. And the more teams we have, the faster we’ll be able to find Abel.”

  More teams are better. Also, the others don’t need to drag around someone whose inner circuitry might go haywire at any time, possibly betraying their position and getting them killed.

  She watches the other four glance at one another; they’re not totally buying her reasoning. But no one protests. Instead, Zayan says, “You’re the soldier, so your plan goes.”

  Virginia checks her weapon. “Three teams. Let’s do it.”

  Noemi speaks into the comm unit linked to the Vagabonds who’ve agreed to help: “Flight team, go.”

  Ship engines hiss and hum in the distance, sending up sprays of snow on the horizon. As they stand by their snowmobiles, they watch five volunteer Vagabond ships rocket toward the Winter Castle, flying high enough to avoid hitting it, but low enough to set off every proximity alert in the place. Even at this distance, they can hear the faint wail of the faraway klaxons.

  As the ships spin back around to buzz the castle one more time, some of the ground-level hatches open. Queens and Charlies zoom out on snowmobiles, their eyes raised to the sky, their weapons aimed upward. The scanner counts off the meters as Noemi’s teammates get on their three snowmobiles and fire them up. Virginia rides behind Ephraim; Zayan holds on to Harriet’s waist; and Noemi takes her own.

  Noemi raises her hand and chops down through the air: Go.

  Ten minutes later, creeping down a corridor with her back sliding along one wall, Noemi thinks, Why does the Winter Castle have to be so damned big?

  The place is beautiful in the same ornate, overdone manner as the Osiris. Instead of the golds, turquoises, and siennas of that ship, the Winter Castle is decorated purely in white, silver, and pale blue. The designers must have taken their inspiration from snowflakes, because every window is hexagonal, as are the floor plans of many rooms. Intricate filigree decorates even the service corridors, adding traces of sparkle. Noemi can only imagine the ornate splendor of the bedrooms and amusement areas where the rich and powerful were meant to play.

  Her attention to these details doesn’t make her forget the small security cameras every fifty meters or so. She just has to hope Gillian and her mechs are so caught up in fending off the Vagabonds outside that they aren’t paying any attention to what’s going on inside.

  Footsteps around the next corner make Noemi freeze. She readies her blaster, thankful that at the moment she’s stable and steady. Take me to Gillian Shearer’s laboratory, she rehearses in her head. Do it, and nobody has to get killed. Nobody’s going to get killed regardless, but whoever’s in the next room doesn’t have to know that.

  Better to choose the moment of confrontation rather than wait to be surprised. She takes a deep breath and spins around the corner. “Take me to—Abel!”

  “I realized someone had managed to get in.” Abel smiles. His face is alight with relief, and something else—it looks somewhat like satisfaction. “I hoped it would be you.”

  It’s him. It’s really him. He must’ve found another way to escape when Gillian was called away to deal with the Vagabonds. And he didn’t pin himself to the ceiling this time. Abel’s all right!

  Noemi flings her arms around him in relief so profound it feels almost like rapture. “How did you manage to hold Shearer off? Are you okay?”

  “I’m better than I’ve been in a long time.” He embraces her, too, gingerly at first, then more firmly. “Are you alone?”

  “No. Let me signal the others and we can get out of here.” Swiftly, Noemi hits the code on her comm unit that will signal the other teams to hurry back to their snowmobiles. The signal doesn’t go through—they’re too deep within—but they should only have to travel another few meters to have better luck. This was all so much easier than she thought it would be; it feels like a miracle.

  Except that it’s somehow oddly… off.

  “I was delighted when I saw you on security cams,” Abel says, tilting his head. “But I wasn’t sure you’d ever come back to Haven.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Noemi asks. “We found out you
were in trouble! I’d never leave you in danger. In fact, I don’t think I want to leave you at all, ever. Besides, there’s something about—about Bellum…”

  Her voice falters as she trails off. Abel’s reaction feels wrong to her. He’s focused on different things than she’d expect. Why?

  For reassurance, she looks into Abel’s blue eyes.

  No. She’s looking into blue eyes.

  But this isn’t Abel.

  28

  ABEL APPEARS TO HAVE NO PHYSICAL FORM. THIS IS peculiar, but he thinks he can adjust.

  It surprises him how difficult it is to order his thoughts without anchoring them in physical space. Learning to do so would no doubt be an excellent long-term goal, but he’s eager to figure out precisely how it is he still exists. Therefore a mental shortcut is in order.

  He visualizes his surroundings, trying to come up with images that would match the vague sensations at the edge of his consciousness. After an immeasurable while, the oblivion acquires a sort of grayness. The grayness coalesces into fog, and finally, as he concentrates, the fog dissipates into a fine mist. Abel finds himself standing in a kind of grotto, where both water and stone are in soft shades of greenish gray. Light of some sort allows him to see, but he can find no obvious source for it.

  Then he realizes that, in this place, his body seems to glow. It is, perhaps, the illumination of thought.

  “How can I possibly continue to exist?” Abel says. The grotto is solid enough for his voice to echo slightly. “My memories were removed from my body. That should have destroyed my consciousness.”

  His first thought is that maybe Burton Mansfield didn’t manage to get Abel entirely out of his head. Maybe he’s still in there, being forced to operate as Mansfield’s subconscious. If so, he intends to fill his creator’s dreams with enough horrors to keep a Freudian analyst busy for years.

  But Abel senses that he’s left his former body completely.

  Perhaps Noemi’s right about the existence of an afterlife, he thinks. Does the soul live on after death? Is there some kind of heaven, even for mechs? If so, it seems mechs must construct their own. Abel looks around the grotto, which isn’t the most compelling location he’s ever seen. He might want to try creating something more festive.

  In the mist, he glimpses a kind of shape, more solid than the others. It moves, and Abel realizes he isn’t alone.

  Is this God? If so, how interesting.

  The figure speaks with a female voice. “It’s not so dark anymore.”

  “No,” Abel answers. “I appear to be glowing. Is that by design?”

  “Design,” she repeats. Although her tone is uncertain, the word could be interpreted as a reply to his question. It seems possible that this indeed is some manner of deity.

  He straightens. “May I ask if you are an entity, or a representative of entities, that could be understood as godlike or divine? If so, can you tell me whether you were ever accurately understood and worshipped by a human religion, and if so, which one?” Identification is important. If he’s dealing with a deity that resembles the Christian Holy Spirit, Abel will conduct himself differently than he would with, say, Hel, the Norse goddess of death.

  After a long moment, the voice laughs. “No. No. I’m no god. No god at all, no god anywhere. I just got stuck here by someone who pretends to be a god.”

  Disappointing, but not uninteresting. Abel resets to agnosticism and carries on. “Can you explain exactly where we are?”

  “Are you real?” She sounds somewhat more focused. “Your accent is rather similar to mine. I’ve imagined so many things, so many, many things. Wonderful and horrible, over and over, all these years. But I never imagined another voice before. So maybe you are real.”

  “I believe myself to still be real,” Abel says, “though the nature of my existence is currently in some doubt. It’s entirely possible that I exist only within another person’s mind, but you are not that person. Do you also believe yourself to be real?” Abel has never had another conversation where so little could be taken for granted.

  She replies, “I was once. I was, wasn’t I? I was real, and then Burt made me something else entirely.”

  Burt. Abel remembers what he’d seen in Gillian’s laboratory, remembers her story of a broken, half-stored consciousness forced to communicate via Ouija board. “Are you the late Robin Mansfield?”

  “My name. You said—oh, I had no idea how good it would be to hear my name again!”

  The shape in the fog moves as though to stand, and as it does so, it clarifies into human form, glowing as brightly as his own. Although Robin Mansfield died before he was constructed, Abel has seen many images of her, so he recognizes her long face, high cheekbones, and soft auburn hair. Is she asserting her own appearance, or is Abel constructing her image from those long-ago photographs and videos? Either way, she stands before him, an uncertain smile on her face, wreathed in some sort of garment that might be made of nothing more than fog. Whatever he and Robin Mansfield are now, they are no longer alone.

  The moment of recognition seems to have focused Robin considerably. “Who are you?” she asks.

  “I’m called Abel. Model One A of the Mansfield Cybernetics line.”

  Her face falls. “Oh no. Burt said—he said Model One A would be for him, a mech that wouldn’t be a person until he lived in it, but would also somehow be a person even before that—somehow—”

  “I am a mech with a soul,” Abel confirms. He could argue that the existence of a soul has now been scientifically proven. Noemi would be proud. “I attempted to escape Professor Mansfield to lead my own life, but your daughter, Gillian, recaptured me. She’s grown into a cyberneticist as well, by the way. She downloaded Mansfield’s consciousness into my body, and now I’m… here.”

  “Wherever here is,” Robin says. Her tone has become distant again.

  “The likeliest hypothesis is that we’re both trapped in a complex data solid.”

  “It falls pretty short of paradise.” With a sigh, she steps closer to Abel, examining him. “You look so much like him when he was young. Before he got hardened, while he could still relate to his fellow human beings. Burt made you in his image. I guess he’s still playing god.”

  “It’s one of Professor Mansfield’s favorite pursuits,” Abel says.

  “So he captured your soul, too, put you here—”

  “Actually, I believe both Mansfield and Gillian intended to erase my soul. But I traveled out of my body under my own power somehow.”

  It’s the Tether, Abel realizes. Tether technology is both hardware and software. But Abel’s software is more than just programming; it is part of his essence, his self. When Gillian upgraded him for her father’s convenience, she didn’t think about what it would mean for Abel. Hardly surprising, since she never considered Abel’s well-being at all.

  However, it appears Gillian has altered Abel’s consciousness on the most basic level. He isn’t just able to transfer messages with the Tether; he can subconsciously transfer his very soul, to anywhere in the galaxy.

  Abel corrects himself. He can transfer his soul to any receptor with sufficient bandwidth and memory storage that happens to be within range. Not quite anywhere.

  But it was enough to save him from death.

  Robin Mansfield is staring at him dazedly. Already she’s losing focus again. Abel quickly resumes the conversation. “My survival was accidental, an instinctive reliance on my Tether technology.” This is the likeliest hypothesis by far, so Abel speaks as though it were certain. “Whereas you were transferred into a data solid, I appear to have transmitted myself into one.”

  “It’s horrible, isn’t it?” she says, sorrow in every syllable. “Not yet, for you. Not at first. But wait a month. Or a year. Or a decade. Or—or—forever, I think I’ve been in here forever—”

  “You died approximately thirty-four years ago. Have you been conscious all this time?”

  She nods. “You can’t imagine how it’s been.”


  “I can, actually.” He says this as kindly as he can, because he knows how much this hurts. “Mansfield abandoned ship during a battle in the Liberty War. He stranded me inside it for thirty years, entirely alone. My surroundings were at least concrete and physical, but that wasn’t much consolation.”

  Robin shakes her head mournfully, and her glow dims. The shadows within the grotto deepen. “Burt could look at me like I was the most precious thing in the worlds,” she murmurs. Thinking of her husband seems to focus her—probably through the pain it causes her. “That look would keep you with him long after you knew better. But finally you’d realize that he wasn’t smiling at you, wasn’t loving you. He was only loving his own brilliance in using you.”

  “Unfortunately,” Abel says, “I didn’t know better until he told me himself.” How cheerfully Mansfield had announced his plan for Abel. How happy he expected Abel to be at the chance to die in his creator’s service. “I understand what you mean about him. The way he could smile through you.”

  “I went mad so many times.” Robin gazes around the grotto. “Sometimes that was easier. The time didn’t quite seem real then. Or every once in a while, I’d pull myself together enough to have fun in here. I could picture the French Alps, or the Scottish Highlands, or even imagine myself looking up at the stars. But it never held. The constellations would shift, or the mountains would melt, and always, always, I was left alone with my own mind. No one should ever be so alone.”

  Abel couldn’t manipulate his reality within the Daedalus equipment pod bay. Which alternative is better? He peers intently into the mist, willing it to change shape.

  The grotto floor flattens; the cave overhead soars up into infinite darkness. What had been mist turns into clouds overhead and low, rolling fog on the ground. Greenish gray fades into shades of silver. Abel stands on an airplane runway, wearing a trench coat and fedora, and Robin wears the uniform of a French officer during World War II.

  She looks down at herself in bemusement. “What is this?”