Defy the Worlds Read online

  The site crash is very near this planet’s equator, which means twilight falls swiftly. The sky above becomes luminous with five visible moons, casting enough reflected light to glitter on the snow. He extrapolates orbits from his observations in the Persephone and realizes no fewer than three moons will be visible at all times, every night of the year. Nighttime is rarely very dark here.

  Convenient, perhaps, for future settlers—but for Abel, it only increases his chances of being detected.

  He stays low, following the terrain. When he reaches the ship itself, he reassesses its condition. Equipment will have been badly damaged, or may be unusable simply because it’s affixed to what was once the floor and is now the ceiling. That will include hospital equipment, biobeds, anywhere an elderly man might be expected to rest.

  Abel finds one air lock just above the line of the snow. He tries the automatic entry, but that’s broken. So he presses in with all his strength until he’s bent the seal itself, which allows him to painstakingly pull back the door. The effort is enough to tire even him. Once he’s cleared enough room for him to squeeze through, he does so, adjusting his vision to the darkness within. The floor beneath his feet slopes sharply to the right, and is curved like the ceiling it used to be. Fortunately his sense of balance is not so easily undermined.

  No intruder alarms go off. As he heads for the inner door, he reasons that any alarms may no longer be operational. This area of the ship would’ve been near main engineering, which is now completely nonfunctional and therefore unlikely to be a priority for Remedy. He may yet get in undetected. The panel to open the door out of the air lock, inverted, is high enough that he has to jump for it, but at least it works. Once it’s open, stale air flows in and he eases out—

  —to see a small huddle of people at the end of the corridor, each one armed and pointing straight at him.

  Abel pulls back 0.17 seconds before the blaster bolts would’ve hit him. His weapon in his hand, he gauges whether to run out of the air lock and try a different entrance—but no, they’ll be on the lookout for him now. Instead he fires, not intending to kill anyone, but he aims close enough for them to know he could.

  Someone shouts, “You heard Captain Fouda! All passengers are to surrender immediately!”

  So these are Remedy members. “I’m not a passenger,” he calls back.

  Another person yells, “You’re not one of us!”

  “I never said I was. But I’m not a passenger either.”

  A pause follows. Their confusion is rational enough, Abel decides. But how should he best present his case to them? If they’re warring against the passengers, as seems likely, they won’t think well of his coming here to save one.

  A third voice calls, “Identify yourself!”

  And somehow, this voice is one he knows.

  17

  NOEMI WINCES AS SHE TURNS HER NECK FROM SIDE TO side, but it doesn’t feel like it’s been injured. Only sore. The cut on her temple’s not too deep either. She drops to the floor (once the ceiling), her silvery boots crunching against metal shavings and bits of debris. “Is everyone okay?”

  For the most part it seems that they are. Delphine, like several other passengers, is crying and sporting a few cuts and bruises to rival Noemi’s. Most of them cling to the tank frameworks like raindrops on a spider’s web, shaken but not seriously hurt. Mansfield lies in his chair, which is tilted against one wall; he looks like a marionette with cut strings, his limbs slightly akimbo and no strength in his form, but he’s breathing. The fields around the tanks kept them all alive.

  The bridge probably had emergency field protection, too. Most of the rest of the ship won’t have, though. Noemi says, “Some Remedy members probably died in that crash. Maybe lots of them. So they’re weakened. If we can pull ourselves together and get back out there—”

  “Pull ourselves together?” Vinh sounds almost hysterical. “After what just happened? Are you heartless?”

  “I just mean—this is probably our best chance.” Noemi double-checks her blaster. Her hands are still trembling, but she suspects she can shoot straight. “Remedy has to be as messed up as we are. Maybe we can catch them off their guard.”

  A low, mournful cry startles her, as well as the others. The sound is coming from the once-unshakable Gillian Shearer, whose cheeks shine with tears. She’s trying to climb up to one of the tanks she was working on earlier, one that has cracked and is draining pink goo down the sides. In the controls is set a diamond-shaped octahedron roughly the size of a large human fist, which is blinking in a strange pattern.

  “Simon,” Gillian sobs. “Oh, God, Simon, no.”

  That was the name of her dead child. Gillian must’ve been hit on the head so hard she doesn’t know where she is, or maybe temporary amnesia just wore off and reminded her of her loss. Embarrassed for the woman, Noemi looks away—until she hears glass cracking.

  She looks up. In the murky cargo bay with its dim orange emergency light, it first seems as though the leaking tank is splintering of its own accord. Then, through the gloom, she makes out a shape within the tank.

  The shape of a tiny human hand pressed against the surface—

  With a great crash, the side of the tank gives away. Fluid gushes down in a waterfall, soaking Gillian and splashing on everything nearby. In the rush, the shape of a human boy falls, too, hitting the floor with a heavy thud. Noemi stares as he tries to get to his hands and knees; he fails, maybe because everything’s slippery but also maybe because he doesn’t know how to move yet.

  This isn’t a little boy, Noemi realizes. This is a mech….

  The mech raises his head. He has long red hair that stretches past his shoulders; he’s sopping wet and completely naked. His features aren’t totally formed yet; there’s something soft about his face, something fetal, even though his height is that of a six- or seven-year-old child.

  But it’s still plain that he’s terrified.

  Gillian, pushing her damp hair back from her face, approaches the crawling mech. “It’s all right,” she says, trying to smile. “I’m sorry we had to rush—it’s going to be all right—”

  The mech says, in a shaky child’s voice, “Mummy?”

  Oh, my God. That’s her son.

  Her dead son.

  Mansfield’s always planned to put his soul within Abel’s body and so be immortal. That means he must have some procedure or ability to record or store his soul—in effect, an entire human consciousness. Yet Noemi had never considered that he might use this power to preserve someone else, much less his own grandchild.

  She looks up at the octahedron, now gone dark.

  “Yes, that’s right, Simon. It’s Mummy.” Gillian’s smile pierces Noemi’s anger with the woman. Nobody could be invulnerable to such naked pain. “We weren’t supposed to wake you up for a while yet. I’m so sorry. Something’s gone wrong, but don’t worry. I’m here, Grandfather is here, and we’ll take care of you. We’ll put everything right later.”

  “My thoughts are noisy.” Simon paws at his head. His fingers are slightly webbed. “Make them stop.”

  “That’s because you’re different now, but we can help you learn to handle all those thoughts.” Gillian moves tentatively toward him. The wet, shivering child in front of her must bear almost no resemblance to the son she lost, but she holds her hand out to him just as she would’ve before. “Come here and let Mummy help y—”

  “No no no!” Simon wails. “I don’t want to!” Gillian stops where she is.

  Mansfield pushes himself up with one arm. Noemi expects him to call to Simon, too, but he speaks instead to his daughter. “This one’s botched.”

  Shaking her head fast, Gillian says, “No. It worked. It’s Simon. Can’t you see that?”

  Simon presses his tiny webbed hands to either side of his head. “There’s all this talking in my head but it’s not words.”

  Noemi’s knowledge of Abel helps her understand what must be happening in Simon’s head. “It’s your
programming,” she says gently, crouching low as she approaches so she won’t be any taller than the child. “You’ve got lots and lots of information in there that you can use.”

  “I can handle this, thank you.” Gillian’s tone could carve ice.

  Probably Noemi is out-of-bounds. But what are the boundaries in a situation like this? All she knows is that she sees something—someone not very different from how Abel must’ve been when he was new. The thought tears at her heart and makes her want to do anything she can for him.

  Maybe there’s nothing to be done, because Mansfield croaks, “Gilly, you need to let this go.”

  His daughter ignores him, crawling half a meter closer to the shivering mech that is also her child. “Darling, come here to Mummy. I’ll set things straight, you’ll see.”

  Simon gets to his feet, unbalanced and shaking. Gillian freezes. No one else in the room says a word. He takes one step toward his mother, then another, and then he runs at her as fast as he can—

  —at mech speed, which is too fast. He slams into Gillian so hard she goes flying backward, hits one of the broken tanks, and slumps to the floor.

  At the sight of his mother’s collapse, Simon screams—a raw, anguished sound—and rushes away crying. The door is now suspended overhead, flush with the ceiling rather than the floor, half open. Simon leaps to it, squeezes through, and vanishes, a wild thing lost in the wreck.

  After a long pause during which no one so much as moves, Vinh says, “What the hell?”

  Noemi agrees completely.

  She hurries to where Gillian lies amid puddles of pinkish mech fluid. Although the force of that collision could’ve broken bones or at least knocked her out, Gillian’s awake, only dazed. Noemi kneels by her side. She means to be helpful, if possible, but Gillian turns her head away. “Why don’t you tell the others, Miss Vidal? Tell them all what we’ve done.” Her voice sounds strange, difficult to read. Does Gillian feel guilty and want Noemi to condemn her? Or is she proud of their resurrectionist powers, no matter how imperfect the execution might be?

  Noemi keeps her voice low and sticks to the most immediate facts of the situation. “What you were going to do to your father—save his soul until you could put it into Abel’s body—you did that with your son when he died. You were creating a new body for him, one just like Abel’s.”

  Gillian laughs, a hoarse, unhinged sound. “Model One A is already obsolete. My father needs him just to tide him over until we can make the next generation of mechs.”

  “The next generation?” Noemi asks.

  “Organic. But they’re so much more than merely organic. They’re Inheritors.” Slowly Gillian sits up, wincing as she touches the side of her head. “That’s the brand name our marketers came up with.”

  “Inheritors?” Delphine comes closer; her tear-streaked face is clouded with confusion.

  “This doesn’t concern you,” Mansfield snaps. He’s managed to push his hoverchair level again, though it must have taken some of the last strength he has. “The rest of you, get away from here.”

  The other passengers scurry to the far corners to take stock of their cuts and bruises. Noemi doesn’t budge. Apparently neither Mansfield nor Gillian expects her to; she already knows too much.

  “We need more time to perfect the technology.” Gillian puts out a hand in the universal gesture for slow down. “So much more time. I wasn’t going to transfer Simon until we’d triple-checked everything—made sure we had backup storage—but the tank cracked in the crash, and I wasn’t going to have a chance to draw a full genetic backup from his bone marrow. I had to do something.” Her lower lip trembles. “Now he’s out there. He must be terrified, and Remedy could go after him at any moment.”

  They put a soul into a mech’s body. They’ve actually made it happen. Noemi doesn’t feel outraged the way she does whenever they threaten to do this to Abel. The mech Gillian made for Simon hadn’t finished growing; it had no soul of its own to be displaced. But just knowing that it’s possible—that they really could’ve done this to Abel, if this hijacking hadn’t separated them forever—sends a shiver down her spine. “So it wasn’t just about Mansfield,” Noemi says. “You planned to make the whole family immortal.”

  “We could’ve shared this with the entire galaxy eventually.” Gillian pulls herself together. “We intended to do our final experiments here, on Haven. My father would’ve been able to get used to his new body without others asking difficult questions. We wouldn’t have had the same… let’s call them, regulatory concerns. We could’ve emerged through the Haven Gate with news of Inheritors for all the greatest minds of the galaxy—with the promise of immortality for the best and brightest. Now it’s all in ruins, like this damned ship.”

  Noemi’s head reels from the possibilities. “If you can make other, uh, Inheritors, why did you bother going after Abel?”

  It’s Mansfield who answers. “For the consciousness to transfer, you need a genetic link,” he rasps. “We’ve yet to prove precisely why—one body ought to be as good as another—but we’ve demonstrated it in the lab twenty times over.”

  Twenty consciousnesses, lost to experimentation. Lost to Burton Mansfield’s fear of death.

  He continues, “And it turns out, you need young genetic material to build an Inheritor. Abel is one—the most primitive Inheritor, but still, he counts. I built him when I was forty-nine years old, and he came out perfect on the first try. So I didn’t bother trying to create another until Abel was lost. By then, I’d aged too much. My genetic structures weren’t as strong. Honestly, it’s a miracle I was even able to make him at forty-nine—the cutoff would be closer to forty, for most. So he’s my only chance.” His voice cracks. “Was my only chance. Lost now.”

  Noemi feels exactly zero pity.

  He pulls himself together and speaks to his daughter. “You jumped the gun, Gillian. You have to have nerve for this business. You can’t panic the first time things go wrong.”

  Gillian bows her head, ashamed to have been found wanting. Noemi can’t believe he’s talking like that about his daughter’s fear for his grandson’s soul.

  Mansfield takes a deep breath, then coughs. “Get Simon back. Recopy the data and sample the marrow. Then do what you can with the version we’ve got.”

  “Yes, Father.” Restored to a sense of purpose, Gillian lifts her head and squares her shoulders. Mansfield has given her permission to think of this replica of her son as something less than human. Is that all there is to it, for her?

  Noemi turns to Gillian and pitches her voice for her alone to hear. “I realize this is a weird time, but we have to reestablish our base on this ship. There might be some localized emergency force fields we could use to seal our area off. And if we set up force fields, that would keep Simon close to us instead of exposing him to Remedy.”

  Hope animates Gillian’s face. Regardless of what her father said, she still holds on to some belief that Simon might be saved. “Yes, we have to do that. We should get started.”

  Some of the passengers have already brushed themselves off, getting ready for action; these few are hardier than their privileged lifestyles would suggest. They’re ready to follow as soon as they have a leader—and somehow, that leader is Noemi.

  “Abel might still make it,” Mansfield murmurs. “He’s smart enough. Curious enough.”

  Noemi shakes her head.

  “That’s what you want to believe, I’m sure. But Abel has a fate,” Mansfield says, maddeningly calm again. “I know that. I designed his fate for him, wove it into his very DNA. His fate is in every strand of his hair and every cell of his skin. His fate is fixed. In the end, he’ll always return to me.”

  “Like he always obeys your orders?” The last direct order Mansfield gave Abel was a command to shoot Noemi in the chest. She’s still alive and well.

  “If he won’t come for me,” Mansfield says, “he’ll come for you.”

  “He’s not coming.” Not even Abel could follow a trail
this obscure.

  “Miss Vidal,” Mansfield rasps. “You’re giving up hope. I haven’t.”

  “You’d better.” She says it savagely, to herself as much as to him.

  Gillian puts one hand on Mansfield’s forehead. “Father, don’t strain yourself.”

  “I’m all right.” His eyes, frosted by old age, fix on the broken tank. “Can’t we find my things? I’d like to have them about me, if—I’d like to have them.”

  Things, Noemi thinks. Not people. I wonder if you’ve ever really loved anyone. He doesn’t even look up at his daughter.

  Oblivious to Noemi’s reaction, he continues, “Really, I should’ve brought the Kahlo. Abel would’ve enjoyed seeing it again. He always liked that painting so.”

  He can look at Abel, see that Abel loved a piece of art—behold an impulse that intelligent and human and alive—and still want to use Abel up and throw him away like a piece of trash.

  Noemi’s unsure of Second Catholic Church doctrine, sometimes; she’s still discovering her individual faith. As she stares down at Mansfield, though, she realizes at least one thing the Church taught her is utterly true: There are worse fates than death. One of them is to live without the capacity for love.

  Abel could never have saved you, she thinks. If you’d ever seen him for what he is, you might’ve saved yourself.

  Noemi fans out with the other passengers, doing what they can to secure the area once more. Force fields still work and can be activated to cut off various corridors; Noemi’s able to plant a few homemade incendiary devices in some key locations, including an auxiliary fuel gauge. She notices that the passengers never leave her completely alone. Maybe they think she’ll abandon them the first chance she gets.

  But where’s she supposed to go? To Remedy? They know her as the maniac who threatened to kill them all earlier today—