Noemi forces herself to focus. As the terror of their Gate crossing fades, exhaustion threatens to drag her down again. “Right. Of course. Can you change the ship registration? Make us anonymous?” She doubts anyone will be on the lookout for a vessel abandoned so long ago, but they might as well be safe.
“I can alter our registration,” Abel confirms. To judge by the screens he’s pulling up on his console, he’s already begun doing so. “However, we have other potentially incriminating evidence to deal with.”
“Like what I’m wearing?” The green exosuit brands her as a soldier of Genesis. “Maybe I can find something else that fits me.”
“Captain Gee was very nearly your size. I suggest you check her quarters.” A small, 3-D cross-section of the Daedalus hovers aboard Noemi’s console, one room burning brighter than the others. Abel continues, “However, I was speaking of a far more critical matter. Upon landing at Kismet, we may well be boarded by docking authorities. Your starfighter and the damaged scout ship could easily be salvage picked up for parts or resale, but we’d have far more difficulty explaining why we’re traveling with a corpse.”
Esther. The daze of weariness and wonder that had spun itself around Noemi breaks. She remembers that she’s alone with a mech on a ship she hardly understands, and the dead body of her friend lies still and cold in sick bay. “We—we tell them she’s a crew member who passed away.”
“How do we explain her injuries?”
“I—” It occurs to her at last that the Kismet authorities would assume she and Abel had murdered Esther. “Her ship is damaged. We can show them that, say she got hurt trying to bring it in.”
“If they examine the scout ship, they’ll know only a battle mech could’ve caused that damage.” Abel shakes his head. “That will raise questions we can’t afford to answer.”
Noemi’s temper flares. “We’ll come up with something! What else are we supposed to do?”
“Bury her in space.”
He says it like it’s nothing. Throw Esther out of the ship. Toss her into the void. Leave her alone for all eternity, drifting in the terrible cold of space, never to be warm.
“No,” Noemi says. “No.”
“Then how are we to—”
She doesn’t hear the rest of what Abel says, because she walks off the bridge and leaves him behind.
It’s nearly half an hour later before Noemi sees Abel again.
She’s spent that time in sick bay with what’s left of her friend. The body doesn’t even look like Esther anymore, not really. The same light-gold hair, the same freckles across her cheekbones: Nothing about Esther seems to have changed except that her skin is paler. And yet somehow, just looking at her, you know everything that ever mattered about Esther—her laugh, her kindness, the funny way she always sneezed three times in a row—her soul is gone, forever.
Noemi stands in front of the biobed, hugging herself, and doesn’t turn when she hears the sick bay doors slide open. Abel’s smart enough not to come too close at first. “If my suggestion earlier gave offense, I apologize.”
She shrugs. “You’re programmed to say that, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
Figures.
“It should’ve been me,” Noemi says, not to Abel, not to anyone really. “She had something to go back to. People who are going to miss her. Who loved her.” Noemi only had Esther, and now she has no one.
Abel doesn’t reply. Probably there’s no preprogrammed response to that.
“She’s not a thing, okay? Not a piece of refuse for us to toss out. Esther was someone, and you have to remember that.”
“I will.” But immediately he tries again. “Whenever you feel it appropriate, we can proceed with whatever method of… burial you prefer.”
Probably he was going to say disposal.
“I know we have to do something, but I can’t just leave Esther lying there in space.” Noemi still feels as if she’s talking to herself. “I can’t leave her alone in the cold. Anything but that.”
Abel remains silent long enough that she wonders if dealing with an actual human, with actual feelings, has fried his circuits. But finally he asks, “It is the cold that bothers you?”
You don’t know what cold means, she wants to answer. He’d probably answer her with the freezing points of various elements in centigrade, Fahrenheit, and Kelvin. So Noemi explains what haunts her. “There’s nothing lonelier than that. Than being cold and alone, and lost.” She swallows hard to keep her voice from choking off. “When I was eight, my family was going into the woods—at wintertime—”
Where exactly were they going? To build snowmen? To see one of the frozen waterfalls? Noemi can’t remember. Sometimes it feels as if the story would make more sense if she could only remember why they were out there in the first place.
“Our skimmer hit a bomb from the Liberty War, one that hadn’t exploded during whatever battle had taken place long ago. It had just been lying there all this time. The snow had covered the shell, so my parents never saw it. They just drove over it, and then—”
Noemi doesn’t remember this part either. For this bit of amnesia, however, she feels grateful. She doesn’t know what their screams sounded like, or even whether they screamed at all.
“When I came to, they were dead. Or dying, maybe. I couldn’t tell. But they were all gone. Mom, Dad, my baby brother. His name was Rafael, but he was still so little I just called him baby. We lay there in the bloody snow for so long—it seemed like forever, and they were so cold. So cold.”
Her throat closes up again. For an instant she feels as if she can recall the time before the crash—her mother’s laugh, the weight of her tiny brother in her lap. But those aren’t real memories. Just her imagination trying to fill in the gaps. The only real memories are those of blood, the smell of smoke, and Noemi shivering in the wreckage, unable to understand why she didn’t die, too.
Abel steps closer. Probably he’ll tell her that nothing in her past is relevant, that her objections are illogical.
Instead he says, “The star, then.”
Noemi turns to him. “What?”
“We could bury Esther in Kismet’s star. Nothing is warmer or brighter. Of course she’d be cremated, but you would still have a sort of grave where you could mourn her. You would always be able to find this star in the sky.”
She stares at him, speechless.
Abel ventures, “The star is visible from Genesis’s northern hemisphere, given good weather conditions.”
“I know. I just—” I can’t understand how a mere machine could think of that. Abel’s idea is sensitive. Even kind. Noemi knows Esther would have approved. Her friend will become part of a star that warms and nurtures an entire world. “That’s good. We’ll do that.”
He seems relieved. She hadn’t realized, before this, that he’d been tense. “Let me know when you wish to proceed.”