Defy the Worlds Read online

  So is the danger, but he considers it irrelevant. Compared to the risk to Noemi, what he’s attempting is nothing.

  He sits at ops and opens one of the interfaces. Then he withdraws an emergency repair edger and slashes across his wrist, reopening the wound he gave himself on Haven. The injury doesn’t bleed as much as it would for a human, but red drops spatter onto the console. As long as it doesn’t ooze into the wiring, this represents no significant problem.

  The metal within Abel has been exposed. Simon hadn’t found such hardwiring necessary; that was one of the few advantages he had. While next generations of Inheritors may have the advantages of greater organic content, Abel thinks with satisfaction, they’ll lack the ability to interface directly with older computer systems, like the one that governs his ship.

  He withdraws one long, slender rod and pushes the end into a small port. The effect is instantaneous and overwhelming; the full flood of Persephone’s data rushes around and into him, too much for even his brain to process. But he retains enough self-control to block out one core function area, then another, until he’s eliminated enough to think clearly. That lets him focus on communications.

  The signals the ship would normally send aren’t on the same frequencies that tether mechs to their Damocles controls. They are, however, extremely close, and now that Abel’s connected with his ship, he thinks he can push that frequency to exactly the right level. Shutting his eyes, he concentrates. The effort feels like static electricity crackling around his brain—

  WE ARE HERE.

  Abel’s eyes open wide as he connects to every mech fighting for Earth. At first it’s the same overload as when he initially connected to the Persephone, plus nearly five thousand. (4862, to be exact—the combined Vagabond and Genesis forces have already destroyed 138 of the invasion force mechs. He can feel their absence from the whole the way a human might feel the gap of a lost tooth.)

  He bears down. Bit by bit, he streamlines the connection until far more information flows out to them than in to him.

  Your grandson was able to do this with a human mind, he says to the Mansfield that dwells within his heart, the shadow-father he’ll never stop defending himself against. If he could, that means I can. I’ll wield a kind of control you never even dreamed of.

  —I am more than you—

  Energy pulses from him, through the circuits of the Persephone, out into space. Every one of his muscles is tensed to the point of spasm, but his physical body has never felt farther away. Abel’s mind is a part of these signals, the ones surging into every single fighter mech and redefining their new targets: one another.

  4717. 4321. 3800. The mech signals wink out like snuffed candles. He feels every single death—physically feels it, a dim reflection of the momentary pain he’s discovered even mechs experience at the end. But as their numbers decrease, the level of control he has to exert lowers. He can bear this. He must. Every mech destroyed is another one that can’t hurt Noemi.

  2020. 1686. 1037. 548. 215. 99. 47. 10.

  Zero.

  Abel severs the connection. The concepts in his mind soften, deepen, becoming thoughts instead of data. As he leans back, his muscles quiver as they try to relax from the tension. The immense heaviness he feels at first seems like a malfunction, before he realizes it’s exhaustion, even greater than that he experienced on Haven. He hadn’t given himself sufficient regeneration time, perhaps. A faint sheen of moisture along his facial skin must be sweat. He has never perspired before.

  Then he realizes the moisture on his upper lip is in fact blood. Abel puts his hand to his face, pulls it away to see red stains on his fingers. He gave himself a nosebleed, a new experience he swiftly decides he doesn’t like.

  He resolves not to try multi-mech control again until he has conducted extensive further study. Even his strength has limits.

  While he carefully reassembles his arm and reseals the skin, he watches the domed viewscreen. The few human-commanded ships that accompanied the mechs to this side of the Genesis Gate are already trying to return, with a few ships of the Vagabond fleet in pursuit. Those Earth ships could put up a good fight on their own, but he suspects the people have forgotten how to undertake their own battles. Without the mechs, they’re lost.

  Meanwhile, the other Vagabond and Genesis ships swoop and swirl in crazy victory spirals. He wonders which one of the tiny darting lights on that screen is the corsair. Normally he’d focus in tighter to locate it, but he finds he doesn’t yet want to.

  He’s… hurting. Not physically, except for the bright line of pain where he cut his arm open. What he feels is more like the absence of something so essential he takes it for granted, maybe similar to what humans experience when they get dizzy or are temporarily deafened by trauma. When he tries to take stock of his condition, he realizes there’s a sort of numb place in his brain—an area he can’t currently probe.

  He decides to ignore this for the time being. His organic repair systems may heal it, and if not, he can have Virginia Redbird mend any damage. Currently Abel has higher priorities, such as finding Noemi amid the post-battle chaos, and dealing with the small ship that’s now approaching the Persephone.

  A transit pod, he realizes. These aren’t fighters; they’re hardly even ships at all, with very little steering and propulsion. They exist purely to allow humans to move between ships in space when neither vessel can dock with the other. The green-and-white marks on its side reveal that this one was launched from one of the larger, older troop ships of the Genesis fleet.

  Abel rises from his chair, surprised to feel his legs shaky beneath him. But he can walk through the corridor without stumbling. Weary as he is, he’s still able to function.

  By the time he gets to the launching bay, the air lock is already cycling. Maybe he should’ve demanded communication from the pod before allowing it to dock; maybe he should’ve set the door not to automatically open. Normally he would have done these things, but in his current daze, they’re occurring to him too late. Everything is too fuzzy, too slow. This must be what having a human brain feels like.

  The air lock cycle ends. Abel immediately steps inside the bay. He can’t keep this individual from coming on board, but if there’s going to be a confrontation, he intends to get it over with quickly. When the transit pod slides open, however, the visitor appears to be… if not a friend, at least an ally.

  “Darius Akide,” he says. “I thought you were a noncombatant.”

  Akide nods. “I went into battle to bear witness, and to chronicle this stage of the war for the survivors, if there were any.”

  “As you see, survivors are numerous.” Abel waits for praise or gratitude that doesn’t come. The humans may not yet have realized what he did for them. However, other questions are far more important. “Did you see Noemi’s ship? She was flying a red corsair.”

  Surprise flickers on Akide’s face as he steps from the pod, his long white robes striking an oddly formal note. “She went into battle? I thought she was required to resign.”

  “Nothing could keep her from defending Genesis.” Abel will need to send out a signal to her directly. What if she was one of the few Genesis pilots lost in the early, bloody stage of the fight?

  Have faith, he reminds himself. Even if he can’t believe in a deity, he can believe in her.

  “What is the purpose of your visit, Dr. Akide?” Abel asks. “You could have simply reached out to me via comms, which suggests you have a message that is delicate and requires extra security. Or you may wish to conduct a confidential conversation.” Could Akide have realized what Abel did to the other mechs? It would be a considerable mental leap, but his cybernetics background with Mansfield makes the connection possible. This would naturally be something Akide would have wished to investigate immediately.

  “Yes, I have a message.” Akide has a strange expression on his face. “Do what you were made for.”

  He straightens to his full height and withdraws a small device from his robe
, larger than a comm link but smaller than a spanner. Before Abel can ask what it is, Akide hits a switch and—

  The floor tilts and sways. Visual input shuts down entirely; touch and smell go to minimum. Abel staggers sideways and would fall except that Professor Akide catches him in his arms. Only sound remains to him, that and the panic of his own thoughts.

  Akide helped design me, Abel thinks in a daze. He knows how to shut me down.

  Whatever signal was sent doesn’t render Abel completely unconscious, the way Mansfield’s old fail-safe did; he retains some mental function and full auditory input. “Why?” he manages to say. If he’s judging the sounds correctly, Akide is dragging him along the Persephone corridor. “What are you—”

  “I’m sorry, Abel. I’m genuinely sorry about this. But I have to secure you.” Professor Akide’s footsteps stagger in irregular thumps; Abel’s considerable weight is no doubt difficult for the older man to manage. “Make sure your consciousness is bound good and tight. Then I can take you back to the one cybernetics lab we have on Genesis. There, I can get some work done.”

  “What—do you—”

  “This battle doesn’t change anything.” Akide sounds resigned, as fatalistic as Noemi described him. “Our victory today will only make Earth more desperate. They’ll send human troops next, and they’ll land on Genesis. They’ll kill our children, burn our homes. We can’t let that happen.”

  “But—Haven—”

  “There’s no guarantee Earth’s people will accept Haven as a new home for humanity. They have to survive a life-threatening disease to even think about it! Even if they do, every person on every single colony world is going to feel betrayed by Earth. Haven can’t be their home for a long time to come, if ever. So to avoid a mass uprising, Earth must conquer Genesis, immediately. The battle today proved that. That means this is our last chance to stop them.” Akide takes a deep breath. “Long ago I learned to question the work I did with Burton Mansfield. I thought I’d left it behind me. Now I see God’s true purpose in it. He led me to Mansfield, because Mansfield would lead me to you.”

  They want to destroy the Genesis Gate. The only way to do that is to send Abel through in a ship with a thermomagnetic device—Noemi’s original plan, all those months ago. In the resulting detonation, Abel would be utterly destroyed, possibly vaporized.

  And Akide has the programming knowledge to force Abel to do it.

  Noemi wouldn’t allow Abel to choose the path of destroying himself to destroy the Gate. Instead it seems that destruction has chosen him.

  35

  THERE’S NOTHING WORSE THAN BEING AT THE HEART OF A battle you’re unable to fight.

  Noemi decides this about the fourth time a mech flies straight into what would’ve been her crosshairs. Her thumbs tighten on the controls, instinctively seeking triggers for weapons that aren’t there. In the corsair, it accomplishes exactly zero, except for accidentally turning on Virginia’s music.

  Once she’s shut that off, she tries to take stock. Without the combat map provided by command, or any communications with her fellow fighters, making sense of the battle is almost impossible. Genesis starfighters dart among Vagabond ships of every size and stripe. Mechs fly around her, random as gnats, sometimes so thick they blind her to the rest of the starfield. She’s still registering as a civilian vessel to them, so she’s safe, but Noemi didn’t come here to stay safe. She came here to help.

  Even without weapons, she can defend her world.

  Months ago, she was on the verge of being captured by Stronghold authorities when Virginia flew by in this exact ship. Virginia had defended the Persephone not with blasters or lasers, but by scrambling the signals all around her.

  Why didn’t I ask her exactly how she did that? Noemi thinks as she goes through the various controls, familiarizing herself more with the corsair’s less-critical functions. That would’ve been an extremely useful conversation to have. Mega-useful. Finally she hits upon a subroutine in communications that ought to work. Here goes nothing….

  The corsair broadcasts on wavelengths that rise and fall in sine curves across the control panel. At first she wonders whether she’s now playing Virginia’s music to the mechs, which would be hostile but not effective. Then she sees a handful of mechs fold their strange metallic wings, almost like bats preparing to sleep. A smile spreads across her face as she realizes they’ve lost their command signals from the Damocles.

  That’s exactly what they’re doing, Noemi thinks. They’re falling asleep!

  Laughing out loud, she pushes farther into the thick of the night and does it again. Once more, a dozen mechs fold up into uselessness, and the Genesis and Vagabond ships pick them off one by one. This isn’t as satisfying as destroying them herself, Noemi decides, but it’s effective. The more Queens and Charlies she incapacitates, the better chance Genesis’s forces have of winning this fight.

  When she swoops into another cloud of mechs, they adjust formation. Noemi’s heart sinks as she realizes the Damocles ship has detected what she’s doing. So has the Katara; the massive vessel changes course, trying to put itself between the corsair and the Damocles, but it’s too late. Any second now, those mechs are going to attack her—

  —yet in one instant that formation breaks, and the mechs turn on one another.

  “What the hell?” she says out loud, her voice echoing inside her helmet. Queens and Charlies firing on one another? Ignoring the Genesis fighters? A Damocles ship must be malfunctioning.

  But there’s something very methodical about the way the warrior mechs are fighting. Their movements are synchronized. Almost like they’re separate parts of the same thing…

  Just like Simon’s mechs were on Haven.

  Only one other person could do this. Only one other person in the whole galaxy, one person most people wouldn’t admit is a person at all.

  Abel! She looks around wildly for the Persephone, though of course it’s impossible to glimpse it in the chaos. The mech-on-mech battle has escalated into an animalistic frenzy, one pouncing upon another in the same eerie rhythms. Shards of metal spin out in every direction; some of them rain against her cockpit.

  Noemi presses a hand to her mouth in both horror and wonder. The wonder is for Abel—he’s expanded his capabilities even further, done something so unprecedented and heroic that it fills her with awe.

  The horror is for what Abel might’ve done to himself. Was Simon’s mind doomed from the beginning, or did he break himself down by trying to control machines, trying to be only a machine instead of a person?

  But the mechs have almost completed their violent self-destruction. Most of the ones remaining are the ones she put to sleep, and the combined Genesis/Vagabond fleet ships have resumed blowing those to smithereens. The lone Damocles ship in her field of vision turns away, clearly heading for the Gate. Earth’s forces are in full retreat.

  They’ll be back. They’ll dig deep. Earth has warships capable of being operated by humans. They may have forgotten how to fight their own battles, but war has a way of reminding people.

  “This isn’t over,” she murmurs, watching the Katara take its place at the center of the fleet, a silent testimony to Dagmar Krall’s contribution and potential new power.

  The war hasn’t ended. It’s just entered a new phase, one Noemi can’t guess at. But she senses the danger will be even greater.

  Flying toward Abel’s ship feels like swimming against the current. Almost all the other ships in the fleet have begun their journey home, zipping past her, leaving wake trails in the debris of the battle. One of the larger Genesis vessels, the Dove, lingers near the Gate—for more readings, or another message, she figures. Other than that, she and Abel are going to have this corner of space all to themselves.

  Don’t worry about what’s to come, she tells herself. Go back to Abel. Live in the moment. Kiss him every chance you get. As soon as she gets within range, she signals the Persephone.

  No response.

  Noemi st
raightens in her seat and tries again. Nothing. A chill sweeps through her as she accelerates. He pushed too hard. Controlling the mechs did something terrible to him. Or maybe one of the mechs got inside the Persephone to stop him? Abel can defend himself, of course, but then he ought to be answering her, and he’s not.

  She doesn’t become truly afraid until the corsair slides into the Persephone’s launching bay and she sees the Genesis transport pod.

  Someone came up here to see Abel, and that someone must be responsible for his silence.

  The second the air lock’s done cycling, she springs the cockpit, yanks off her helmet, and goes for the weapons locker. Blaster in hand, Noemi walks slowly into the corridor. Every nerve is on edge. Her ears prick at every small noise, but it’s just the usual sounds of a spaceship—air filtration, the faint buzz of the mag engines, and—

  Wait.

  She listens closer and hears it again: The faint clink of metal on metal ahead, somewhere around the sick bay.

  Noemi gets her back to the wall and keeps her weapon at the ready as she inches closer. The fear inside her as she ducks behind each strut, straining to hear what lies ahead—it reminds her of her first day on this ship. She was headed to the sick bay then, too. The doors on board close automatically, so there’s no way she can get in there without giving away her presence. But she can at least listen and figure out as much as possible about what she’ll face when she goes inside.

  Even before she can make out words with any clarity, she recognizes Abel’s voice, and she recognizes that something’s badly wrong. Even his tone sounds… groggy, not quite right. Leaning her head against the nearest panel, the best conduit for sound, she finally understands a bit of what he’s saying. “—impossible for you to be sure.”

  “We only learn through experimentation.”

  Wait, is that—Professor Akide?

  Astonishment boils into fury. Noemi doesn’t know how he overpowered Abel or exactly what kind of experiment he plans to run, but she’s putting a stop to this, now.