by Claudia Gray
“But”—she struggles for words, and finds the wrong ones—“it just seems so unfair, that you have to live like this.”
“What other way could I live? Mansfield could hardly have given me a choice of whether to be mech or human. My nature combines elements of both. Being a mech is part of my soul, of who I am. I don’t want to change it. Do you think I should want to?”
“You mean you don’t want to be human?”
“What would be the point of wishing for the impossible? Besides, I’m faster than humans. Smarter. More durable. I make use of all my capacities and even enjoy them. Why would I want to reject them?”
“That’s not what I meant,” she protests. “I only know Mansfield shouldn’t have done that to you.”
“He shouldn’t have made me in the first place?”
“Stop twisting my words around!”
“I’m not.” Abel looks at her the way he did the first day they met, when they were still enemies bound together only by her desperate need and a quirk in his programming. She hated him then. He didn’t like her either. “You pity me, simply for being. You saved me and spared me because you recognized the value of my soul, but you still don’t believe my life is as valid as yours.”
“That’s not true.” She puts her hands on either side of his face. Her skin is rough and abraded, her nails broken down. Blood from her self-inflicted injury still mars her fingernails. The contrast between the proof of her struggle on this ship and the tenderness in her eyes takes the heat from his anger. He’s acutely aware of the presence of at least a dozen Remedy fighters sleeping nearby; surely they should be out behaving like soldiers, not present for a moment this intimate between him and Noemi. “Abel, you’ve talked about how alone you are. How you don’t have anyone else in the galaxy like you. Was it right of Mansfield to do that to you?”
“No. But if Simon can be saved—if the organic mechs can prove sophisticated enough to possess souls—I won’t be alone for long.”
Noemi winces, as if in pain. “Will you just ask yourself if maybe you want this too much?”
Will you question your own prejudices, Noemi? Can you not try to see him as a little boy in need of help? The words are there, waiting to be spoken, but Abel doesn’t say them. He doesn’t want to argue with Noemi—not when they’re in such danger, and he can’t blame her for being afraid. The pain of Mansfield’s death is fresh for him, startlingly powerful, with dimensions Abel knows he’s only begun to map. Noemi’s presence is his only comfort. He doesn’t want to push her away, not ever but especially not now.
But she is so horribly wrong.
Footsteps in the hallway make them both turn toward the sound. Noemi lowers her hands from Abel’s face as two Remedy members enter on either side of Riko, supporting her on each arm. She looks even paler than before and is hardly able to walk.
“What’s going on?” Noemi goes to Riko’s side.
One of the Remedy soldiers says, “Another sick one.” He rubs his forehead, telegraphing his own discomfort. “Somebody must’ve caught the flu before we started on this mission. Just our luck.”
Abel turns back to the sleeping Remedy soldiers behind him, reexamining them with his full attention. If he’s estimated the size of the Remedy attack force correctly, this is a far higher percentage of fighters than would normally be allowed to take simultaneous rest breaks. When he attunes his hearing to check their breathing, many of them have elevated respiration rates; their bodies are not efficiently processing oxygen.
He remembers the readings he took on his flight in. The toxicity levels in that one sector weren’t compatible with human life. No person exposed to that for more than a brief time would be able to continue functioning. Death would follow within mere days—if not hours.
Swiftly he goes to the nearest console and activates as much of the Osiris’s sensor array as still functions. When he does a sweep, he realizes that the area he flew over wasn’t an aberration. Those toxicity levels stretch out over an enormous area, possibly even planetwide.
That means every human being on this ship is about to die. The Remedy fighters, the passengers—and Noemi.
23
SEVEN HOURS AGO, NOEMI HAD THOUGHT BEING stranded in a crashed, upside-down spaceship with a group of terrorists, their panicked hostages, and a potentially homicidal kid-turned-mech was one of the most dangerous situations she’d ever found herself in. Now she only wishes things could be that easy again.
Because—for the second time within ten days—she stands at the center of a plague.
She picks her way across the shimmering tiles on the ceiling/floor of what had been designed as a dining hall but has become a makeshift hospital. The emergency lighting at ankle level makes the tiles glitter and casts surreal shadows in the murky room. Nearly two dozen Remedy members lie on various cots and pallets, each of them pale, shaking, and feverish. Whatever they’re suffering from isn’t Cobweb, but it’s just as vicious. The sick people’s eyes are bloodshot, and they murmur as they weave in and out of consciousness. Sometimes they make perfect sense, and other times they rant about explosions, or mechs, or even dragons.
Is this what it’s like on Genesis at this moment? Or maybe Ephraim’s already led a Vagabond convoy to her world with lifesaving drugs.
Or maybe Earth’s already invaded, killing what few survivors remained, and is even now claiming Genesis as its own.
Riko’s steadier than most of the Remedy fighters, at least so far. She curls on the floor in a fetal position, arms wrapped around an engraved silver champagne chiller meant for finer things than serving as a vomit bucket. “I’m okay,” she murmurs unconvincingly. “I am. If I can just get some sleep—”
“That’s right.” Noemi strokes Riko’s short, spiky hair and notices how clammy her forehead has become. “You need rest. Close your eyes and try not to worry, all right?”
She’s not the most nurturing person, under most circumstances. Nursing the Gatsons had been awkward at best, her clumsy ministrations welcome only because nothing better could be had. Today—or tonight, whenever it is—she’s drawing on her memories of how Abel tended her when she got so desperately sick with Cobweb. It’s amazing how much more natural it feels, being caring and gentle, when she asks herself what Abel would do.
Maybe all this time she’d only needed someone to give her permission to be… soft. To not have her shields up all the time.
Abel himself is hard at work on the remnants of the bridge, bringing up what few ship functions can be restored, for what little time they can continue to operate. As more and more Remedy fighters fall ill, Captain Fouda grows more anxious. Maintaining control of the Osiris with only a fraction of his force will be difficult—or would be, if the passengers could strike. They must be as desperately ill as the Remedy fighters around Noemi. Fouda wants to automate as many force fields and defense systems as possible, so Abel’s devoting his attention to bringing up what little additional power the ship still has.
Both Noemi and Abel need to play by Remedy’s rules for a while. When they can work out that long-term strategy Abel mentioned, they’ll figure out how to escape from this situation.
As if he’s sensed Noemi thinking about him, Captain Fouda strides through the room, ignoring the patients and medicines lying around, his boots crunching on the fragile peacock-blue tiles underneath. He doesn’t step on anyone who’s sick, though he’s so careless that’s probably just luck. “No one’s up yet?” he demands, apparently to everyone at once. “Not one person has gotten better?” He gets louder with every word. Before long, he’ll be shouting, waking up all the patients and ensuring they remain sick even longer.
So Noemi goes to him, gesturing toward where some of the sicker ones lie. “Whatever this is, it’s serious. Yelling at them isn’t going to help. These people are going to need care for at least a day or two.” Privately she thinks it might be much longer; for a few, fevers have spiked high enough to cause convulsions.
Fouda scowls a
nd steps closer to her. “That’s time we don’t have. We’re down too many operatives as it is.” Then he turns away to stalk through the ad hoc sick bay, as though he could heal these people through his anger alone. Noemi begins to turn away, then catches sight of something on the back of his neck, just above his collar. Straightening, she squints to make it out.
The pale lines on his skin are too random for a tattoo; they match the marks on the side of his face, so maybe that’s more battle scarring. Yet the marks are familiar, too, in a way she didn’t spot before….
They look a lot like the pale white lines on her shoulder, the ones that won’t go away—her scars from Cobweb. He suffered from it, too; he survived, like her.
Probably their shared experience should make her feel more compassionate toward him. Instead she only wonders how anybody could have been that sick, felt that much pain, and not be able to summon any concern for others.
The same way you rationalize setting off a bomb in the middle of a music festival, she thinks. You stop thinking of other people as human.
It’s a couple of hours more before Fouda releases Abel from duty. Noemi could time it to the minute, because she knows Abel has come to her as fast as he could. “You’re feeling well?” He reaches for her face, then hesitates; she finds herself wishing he’d come those few inches closer, so they’d have touched.
“I’m fine. I mean, I’m exhausted and I’m hungry and I’d give my left arm to take a shower, but I’m not sick.”
He doesn’t look as relieved as she thought he would. Instead he glances around the sick bay, assessing each patient in turn. “You should be sick.”
“Huh?”
“On landing approach to Haven, I measured high levels of toxicity in the air. They were incompatible with human life—really, with any life we know of. At first I thought it might be unique to that location, but my more recent scans suggest a far broader distribution. It’s possible the entire planet is toxic to human life.”
“But the trees—and there must be animals—”
“They would’ve evolved to survive in these conditions,” Abel says. “Humans have not.”
None of this makes any sense to Noemi. “But they set up this huge expedition here! The richest and most powerful people in the galaxy—they went to all the trouble of building a Winter Castle here and stocking it with servant mechs. There’s no way they would’ve done that if they knew this planet was sick, and there’s no way they didn’t scan this world top to bottom before any of this began. The Osiris would never have been built in the first place.”
Abel takes Noemi’s wrist in his hand, his thumb above the blue lines of her veins. “Your pulse is normal. You appear to be breathing easily—”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
“You can’t be,” he says flatly. “Before, I thought the ship’s air filtration systems must be operating at enough efficiency to keep the humans on board alive. Obviously that isn’t true. Every person on this ship will fall ill and die unless they’re removed in time.”
“If I were going to be sick, I would know by now. Riko started feeling bad more than a day ago.”
He frowns. “The passengers haven’t asked for help. Nor did Gillian show any signs of illness when Fa—when we spoke to her last.”
Is Delphine Ondimba sick like this right now? She’s the one passenger Noemi liked, the only one worth worrying about. “It might only have been setting in. There’s no way almost everybody in Remedy would come down with this while every single passenger on the Osiris would stay well.”
Abel ventures, “Possibly the better health care the passengers would’ve received explains it. They’ve always eaten better food, had opportunities for optimized exercise without being subjected to hard labor—much as you grew up in a far healthier environment on Genesis.”
Briefly Noemi recalls Ephraim Dunaway explaining that he knew she was “too healthy” to be from anywhere but Genesis. If only they had a doctor like Ephraim here. “It’s not just me, though. Did you notice that Captain Fouda’s fine, too? So are a handful of the other Remedy fighters.”
“It’s mysterious,” Abel admits. She knows he hates confessing he doesn’t know something nearly as much as a cat hates getting wet. It would be funny if the situation weren’t so desperate. “Still, I’d like to further analyze the possibility that preexisting health makes a difference. Remember how your physical condition helped you when you had Cobweb.”
Cobweb. Noemi feels the white lines on her shoulder prickle, and thinks of the scars along the side of Fouda’s face. “Oh, my God.”
“What?” Abel takes hold of her shoulders. “Are you dizzy? Nauseated?”
“I’m one hundred percent okay,” she says. “And I think maybe I know the reason why.”
Reaching the ship’s real sick bay takes some effort. It’s not that far away, but the doors don’t reach all the way to the old ceiling, now the floor, so Abel has to jump for it and help Noemi over. Then the consoles and biobeds are suspended so far overhead that she wonders why they bothered coming here when the equipment is out of reach.
But Abel rigs up an emergency platform and is able to work on the consoles just as efficiently when they’re upside down. Noemi remains at the base of the platform to steady it while he works. Her head is at the level of his calf. Greenish light from the screen illuminates his face as he says, “The database has files about Cobweb, but they’re all locked. Only Burton Mansfield and Gillian Shearer are cleared to access them.”
Good luck getting Gillian to help them out. Noemi groans and leans her head against Abel’s leg. “So much for that.”
“Actually, I suspect they’re locked only to a basic DNA scan. If so, we’re in luck.” Abel holds his hand up to a soft-scanner that reads tissue. In the dim green glow, Noemi can see dark matter crusted under his nails—his own blood. She’ll never forget watching Abel literally tear his own body apart only to see his unworthy creator one more time.
The scanner blinks and whirs, and data begins to rapidly unfurl on the screen. She can’t read it at this distance, at least not upside down, but she begins to smile. “You got through, didn’t you?”
“As far as this ship knows, I am Mansfield.” He pulls back in surprise.
“What? What is it?”
Slowly Abel says, “They’ve all had Cobweb.”
“Huh?”
“Every registered passenger aboard this ship was infected with a weakened form of the Cobweb virus before departure. This was done under clinical supervision, with antiviral treatment being administered almost immediately. Under such conditions, Cobweb would virtually never be fatal.”
Everything begins clicking together. “We knew Cobweb was man-made,” Noemi says. “We knew they made it for some purpose, but we couldn’t guess what it was.”
“We still lack proof,” Abel says, “but I believe we both share the same theory.”
Whatever Earth scientists were trying to do, they screwed up. If it’s a weapon, it escaped into their own population before they were able to use it against yours, said Ephraim Dunaway months ago on Stronghold, when he explained what little Remedy knew about the Cobweb virus at that time. If word got out that this disease was created by Earth, we’d have mass rioting on every world of the Loop.
“Cobweb wasn’t designed to hurt people,” she says. “It must’ve been designed to save them.”
Abel nods. “Haven must have been found several decades ago. Earth’s government would’ve realized it would be the perfect replacement for Genesis, if only for the few environmental factors that kept it from being safe for human beings. So they attempted to bioengineer a virus that would rewrite human DNA, only enough for them to endure the conditions here. In that regard, Cobweb does exactly what its creators hoped. But the virus is more dangerous to human life than they knew.”
“A lot of people who catch Cobweb get so sick they die.” Noemi shakes her head in wonder. “But the ones who survive… they inherit an entire world.
”
“I put the probability of this hypothesis being correct at approximately 92.6 percent.” Abel hops down from the platform to her side, so lightly and easily that she’s reminded again—he’s not quite human. “There are medicines for Cobweb in storage on the ship, including weaker forms of the virus that might operate as inoculations—”
“Thank God,” Noemi says. She has serious problems with Remedy’s radical wing, but she can’t bear to watch people needlessly suffer and die. “We can help them.”
But Abel shakes his head. “The materials aren’t stored in the sick bay. They were considered ‘high risk’ and are kept in the same area as the tanks for growing mechs. That’s territory currently held by the passengers.”
That was the first place they’d run to, when Noemi told them they needed to control “valuable resources” on the ship. I believed Gillian was being so selfish, leading us there, Noemi thinks. But she knew exactly what she was doing. She was the ruthless soldier at war. I was the one in over my head.
“If Earth made Cobweb a virus,” she says slowly, “one that spread organically, with a high level of contagion, so absolutely everyone would catch it—they didn’t originally intend to hide Haven. They meant to share it with the galaxy.”
Abel considers this, then nods. “That also seems likely. Earth’s government still chose to conceal Haven in the end, but it seems likely they did so primarily to cover up the truth about Cobweb.”
“That’s not a good enough reason. Not to deny this to humanity—to resume the Liberty War—” Noemi gasps. “That’s why they did it, isn’t it? Why they came back decades after we thought they’d let us go? They ended the war when Haven was found. They started it again when they realized they could never reveal the truth about this planet.”
“I can only put that at a 71.8 percent probability,” Abel says gravely.
“You mean—probably. Not certainly, but probably.”
