Defy the Worlds Page 14

  People cry out as the ship lurches beneath them. Noemi yells, “Do we have access to any stabilizers? Any force fields?”

  The shaking finally gets Mansfield’s attention. “The tanks are braced with emergency force fields, of course—”

  “How do we use them to brace ourselves?”

  Gillian has caught on. She dashes to her father, pulling his hoverchair back toward the walls. “Just get to the tanks. Everyone brace themselves on one of the tank platforms!”

  Noemi obeys this woman for what she hopes is the last time ever. On her heels, Delphine says, “It’s going to be a rough landing?”

  “You could say that.”

  It would be more accurate to say they’re almost certainly going to crash.

  People are already clustered near the bottom of this column of tanks, so Noemi quickly climbs the frame. An antigrav force field flickers on in response to the turbulence, trapping them all in a red bubble. That’s okay; the force field makes her distance from the floor irrelevant. Delphine follows on the climb, even though her caftan nearly trips her up. Once they’re close to the top, Noemi settles herself in the framework like a kid balancing on the monkey bars. All around her, the force field tickles with the faintest hum against her skin. When they hit a jolt, the field’s going to get a lot stronger, but she’ll deal with that later.

  Not much later. From here she can still see the console Delphine was working at lying on the floor. There’s nothing on the viewscreen now but whiteness.

  The Osiris lurches violently. Noemi grabs the framework harder, by instinct, but she can feel the force field tightening around her in an almost painful grip. They’ve gotten close enough to the surface for artificial gravity to shut off. That’s a standard ship function, normally an energy saver, but here it’s going to be deadly. Without internal gravity, everyone on board could be battered to death by the ship’s ragged descent.

  “Are we spinning?” Delphine cries. “It feels like we’re spinning!”

  It’s hard to tell from the way it feels—the dizziness could just be panic, but the force field’s hold mutes that. The evidence is all visual: boxes of chocolate and silk negligees, stylish shoes and monogrammed suitcases, tumbling around like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.

  We’re going down, Noemi thinks. We’re going down hard—

  The first impact is the worst. Noemi’s flung forward so violently her neck pops, her forearms slam into the framework, and the force field around her feels like it might snap her in two. Debris smashes tanks, strikes passengers, thuds against metal and bone. As screams fill the air, Gillian yells, too late, “Brace yourselves!”

  A second impact slams into them, knocking out main lights and leaving only the orange emergency glow. Then there’s a third impact. A fourth. They’re skipping across the surface like a stone against water, Noemi realizes. Even the best skipping stone sinks in the end.

  The Osiris strikes something—a rock, a ridge, no telling—and slides sideways until it begins to roll. Noemi closes her eyes and hangs on as they tumble over and over, debris flying in every direction. Something heavy within her force field strikes a glancing blow to the side of her head, and she feels the heat and wetness of blood at her temple. There’s no up or down any longer, just a terrible dizzying rush that seems as if it will never end.

  Finally, though, the ship makes one last flip and skids to a halt—upside down.

  Noemi gasps as she looks down at what had been the ceiling of the tank room but is now the floor. She’s clinging to the framework, only partly held up by the force field, which is no longer working at full strength; some of the fields appear to have shorted out completely. The console Gillian had been working at hangs uselessly from above. Below is a bloody, smoldering pile of dazed humans, broken machinery, and wrecked luggage. Main power flickers on again, then goes off, probably for good. In the dim orange emergency lights, the huddle below looks even more surreal and monstrous.

  This ship will never fly again, Noemi thinks. We’re stranded here.

  Forever.

  16

  ABEL HAD ANTICIPATED THAT EARTH FORCES WOULD soon investigate what had happened near Proteus. However, he’d failed to anticipate the scale of the investigation.

  “Did they send every ship on Earth ever?” Virginia grumbles from her place at the helm. She keeps the Persephone close to Halimede, one of Neptune’s outermost moons. Her bright orange jumpsuit is the one flare of color in the otherwise darkened bridge.

  “You’re exaggerating for humorous intent,” Abel says, “but this is a far larger search party than I would’ve anticipated, even considering the scale of the Remedy attack.”

  To his surprise, Virginia laughs. “You still don’t get it, Abel. If Remedy had hit a Vagabond convoy, we’d see about one and a half scout ships out here taking readings. A luxury ship with Burton Mansfield aboard? Earth won’t stop until they get to the bottom of that, I promise you.”

  “Your point is well taken. But this investigation is still limited.”

  That earns him a puzzled frown from Virginia. “What do you mean?”

  Abel expands the relevant area on the viewscreen and lights up the vectors he’s calculated as green shimmering lines against the starfield. “It’s very easy to tell which direction the Osiris flew in. Once they’re scanning that area, these ships should be able to pick up on the anomaly in the Kuiper Belt. If they were genuinely searching for the passengers, they’d be pursuing the Osiris, not merely gathering data on the Remedy assault.”

  “Oh, man. You’re right. Why aren’t they doing that?” Virginia scowls as if the search parties were personally offending her.

  “My guess is that they’ve received orders not to. Why they got those orders, and from whom, I can only guess.”

  As a rule, Abel tries not to guess without good cause. Assumptions can be useful mental shortcuts, but they can also mask dangerous gaps in logic. Yet he finds it hard to dismiss his set of conclusions:

  The anomaly they’ve detected must in fact be a Gate.

  This Gate was built as a passageway to another habitable world, space station, or other place where large numbers of humans could live.

  Whatever is hidden on the other side of that Gate is something only the powerful know about. Some of those powerful individuals were on the Osiris at the time of its disappearance—Mansfield’s presence alone proves that—but others were not. Some of those left behind must intend to follow the Osiris’s path.

  Given the limited investigation, Abel must conclude that whatever fear these shadowy others have for the friends and family who went ahead isn’t as strong as their need to keep the secret.

  Humans frequently (and inaccurately) speak of mechs as “cold-blooded,” unable to care. It seems to Abel that humans deserve the term far more. Mechs don’t have the ability to care; humans do, yet often choose not to care at all.

  The Persephone remains where it is until the rotation of the planetary system gives the ship an obscured path to approach the hidden Gate. Once they’re within range of the distortion field, Virginia gasps. At first Abel is confused, because he sees nothing but dark, starry sky.

  Then he remembers, Distortion fields are made to deceive electronic sensors. Not human eyesight.

  Swiftly Abel limits his vision to wholly human frequencies to see what Virginia sees—and there it is.

  “We have ourselves a Gate,” she says, “don’t we?”

  “Yes.” But this is unlike any other Gate Abel has seen.

  Most Gates are massive, built to be nearly indestructible, and they shine like the beacons of power they are. This Gate has been constructed to the same dimensions as any other, but were it not for the telltale shimmer across the center, it would be easy to believe it wasn’t completed. No outer plating is bolted to the inner mechanisms of the Gate for long-term protection. Instead, the panels and circuitry are exposed.

  “They haven’t finished it yet,” Virginia suggests.

  “Possibly
. Or possibly this Gate isn’t meant to last for very long.” When she gives him an alarmed look, he adds, “In relative terms. It would remain operable for fifty to seventy-five years, but that’s still far less time than the other Gates will endure.”

  “Why did they waste time building some half-assed Gate? They’re gonna wind up cut off from the rest of the Loop within a couple of generations.”

  Abel nods. “I suspect that’s the idea.”

  Virginia goes very still as she sees the truth Abel’s understood from his first look at this Gate: Whatever’s on the other side isn’t going to be a permanent addition to the Loop, one of the many possible homes for humanity in the future. Whatever world or station awaits them—it will be open for a select few, for a short time. Then it will be sealed off.

  Something very precious lies on the other side of this Gate.

  Several minutes pass before either of them speaks again. Once they’re within a few minutes’ travel of this ramshackle Gate, its messy workings beginning to fill the domed viewscreen, Abel says, “I have to make this trip, but you don’t.” Virginia’s argument on Cray was vigorous and heartfelt, but he wouldn’t blame her if she had reconsidered her decision after seeing the scale of the nearby investigation. “If you’d rather I dropped you off near one of the Saturn stations—”

  “Forget it.” She shakes her head as if waking herself up and leans over her console with refreshed concentration. “Maybe some people could walk away not knowing what’s on the other side, but me? Virginia loves a mystery. I accept this about myself.”

  Abel has learned not to be deceived by her jokes. “You’re a very loyal friend.”

  “If you get mushy on me one more time, I swear to you, I’ll reprogram you in your sleep. You’ll be singing ‘God Save the Queen’ every hour on the hour.”

  “You’re joking.” He waits for the response, then ventures, “…Aren’t you?”

  “Push me and you’ll find out, Robot Boy.”

  The hours of their trip are uneventful. Despite this Gate’s strange appearance, their voyage feels exactly the same as it would through any of the other Gates of the Loop. Neither Abel nor Virginia says a word until they finally spot the world on their sensors, and Virginia brings it up on the viewscreen.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says as they take in the snowy surface of this unknown planet. Her tone is gentler than usual, softer. “It reminds me a lot of—when I was little, before Cray, sometimes we’d go up north and visit my grandparents way at the top of the Rockies. The snow would be a meter deep all around, as far as you could see.”

  Abel has already worked out the planet’s orbit, its likely climate, how the sky would look from its surface. Its fifteen moons will make landing tricky, but the night should be illuminated by reflected light. “This is their summertime.”

  “Really? How deep does the snow get in winter? Don’t answer that.”

  “Its orbit and rotation suggest minimal variations in the seasons,” Abel adds. “I’d guess the average temperature fluctuates less than two degrees Celsius through the year.”

  This is the chilliest of the habitable worlds yet discovered. Stronghold is cold, but still warmer than this—just as lower Scandinavia is warmer than northern Alaska on Earth. Stronghold’s arid surface makes snow extremely rare. Here, the atmosphere has enough humidity for blizzards and frosts. While the oceans he sees are smaller than those on Earth, they’re still vast enough to provide ample moisture for this world. Fish likely dwell within those oceans, and trees adapted to the chill will produce fruit even in a snowy springtime.

  This splendor they see matters little, compared to what they’re not seeing. Abel says, “Can you detect the Osiris? I’m not picking it up on my sensors.”

  “Mine neither—though we know it’s been here.” She hits a panel on her console that makes hazy lines of orange appear on the starfield in front of them, crossing the new planet’s white surface. The ionized trails mark the Osiris’s path. “Looks to me like they landed, terrorists and all.”

  “Do you think we should scan the surface?” Abel is careful not to give Virginia orders. Unlike Harriet or Zayan, she is not his employee, and her ego is sturdy enough to sometimes outweigh her good heart. As the possessor of a healthy ego himself, Abel understands how inconvenient it can be.

  Virginia responds to the suggestion as swiftly as she would’ve rejected a command. Within moments, the screen fills with the image of the Osiris… or what was once the Osiris, and is now only a wreck.

  “Oh, crap,” Virginia says, even as she zooms in tighter on the image. “But—that looks survivable to me. Right?”

  “I think so.”

  Abel feels oddly bifurcated. Half of his brain performs the necessary calculations, projects a scenario in which the pilot of the Osiris failed to account for the gravitational pulls of so many different moons at once, and is content to have solved the logical puzzle. The other half feels as though he has been plunged underwater for an hour or two, as long as his cybernetic lungs can hold out, and his body is now screaming for air as desperately as any human’s.

  Stay alive, Noemi, he thinks. Stay alive.

  He doesn’t send the same message to Mansfield, but Directive One ensures he has to look for his creator, too.

  “I’ll go down and search the surface. Look for Noemi, see if there are any survivors.” He doesn’t mention Mansfield by name.

  “Whoa, whoa, hang on.” Virginia spins her chair around to face him. “What’s this talk about ‘I’? We’re a team, remember?”

  “Any surviving members of Remedy or ship passengers will be desperate for an intact spacecraft. The Persephone should remain in orbit at all times, with a pilot aboard, to ensure it isn’t stolen.”

  She crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Then why don’t you stay while I go?”

  “Because I am physically stronger, better able to operate in conditions of extreme cold, more powerfully motivated, and have greater mental capacity than you.”

  After a long, flat stare, Virginia says, “You really have zero concept of tact.”

  “I understand it. But I prefer honesty.” He’d felt Virginia, who is well informed about cybernetics, would be able to accept these simple truths. Instead perhaps some nuance is called for. “You are of course extremely intelligent, given the limitations of a human brain.”

  “Stick with the ego, buddy. You suck at tact.” Her mood has improved, but her position hasn’t. “What if you get yourself blown up? Going alone is dangerous, Abel!”

  “This entire mission is dangerous. The relative increase in risk upon leaving the ship is irrelevant.”

  At last Virginia sighs. “Fine.” As Abel gets to his feet, she adds, “But I’m monitoring you the whole way!”

  “I’d expect nothing less.”

  A few minutes later, the launching bay doors open and Abel flies Virginia’s corsair down toward the surface, spiraling in a long arc. The moons’ gravity wells tug at him like spiders crawling along their webs toward trapped prey, but he keeps the ship steady. Quickly the snowy planet becomes Abel’s entire sky.

  The Osiris stands out even from a great distance, its gold-and-terra-cotta surface vivid against the pristine snow. Although it crashed into the surface, leaving a kilometer-long gash of broken trees and upturned soil, the ship’s structure appears largely intact. Abel readjusts his assessment of the crash. Assuming internal shock absorption and artificial gravity functions remained operational, most of the passengers are likely to have survived.

  Noemi is alive. Probably she’s alive. And she’s strong enough, enterprising enough, to endure the aftermath of something like this—

  He pushes away the thought. Even hope can’t be allowed to ruin his focus. For now, he has to determine how best to infiltrate the wreck of the Osiris.

  Abel brings the corsair in closer, swooping low to the ground until he’s skimming just above the treetops and rolling hills. The conifers here grow dark blue needles instead o
f green, but otherwise they’re not so different from pine trees on Earth. In the near distance, a spectacular mountain range scrapes the pale sky. Soon, the sunset will filter between the peaks. A waterfall flows down one of the nearer mountains, its crest framed by a shell of ice the color of beach glass. The path of that river can be traced to a large lake that borders a broad plain, which seems likely to be the planned site of the first human settlement; a large structure shows up on his sensors, but absent any life signs, so it’s not important to investigate it at this time. While animal life is abundant in this planet’s oceans, relatively few species live on land, and the air is occupied primarily by pale gray clouds of what seems to be some kind of marsupial bat. Everything about this planet appears both beautiful and benign. Abel understands why people would hope to settle here, why they would consider living with the omnipresent cold a small price to pay.

  What he doesn’t understand is how they overlooked every other danger sign. Because now that he’s in the atmosphere, able to take his own readings—

  This cannot be accurate across the planet, he surmises. The toxicity rates must be specific to this locality, through a mechanism as yet undetermined. Otherwise humans would never have attempted to settle this world. No doubt he just flew over one rare, uninhabitable area, one that begs for further study.

  Abel intends to study it, later. His focus must remain on the Osiris, and on what and who he may find within.

  He lands the corsair roughly two kilometers from the crash, behind the crest of a hill. Although he’d like Noemi to know he’s coming for her, very few on board will welcome his presence. Remedy attackers won’t be pleased to see him; Burton Mansfield would be—only because he could then attempt to capture his prize creation. Abel must remain undetected as long as possible. He puts on his white hyperwarm parka, holsters his blaster at the belt, and sets out just as sunset begins to darken the sky.

  The terrain’s rougher going in this area, with multiple boulders and dangerous scree hidden by the snow. The Osiris lies on the edge of a large plateau, near a sharp drop-off—and now that Abel can study the surface up close, he realizes deep crevasses may lurk underneath, hidden by the snow. So he slows his movements, examining every element of the path ahead.