“Now.” Waiting will only put Genesis at risk. Noemi has to complete her mission before the Masada Run, or else hundreds of people will die, including Captain Baz, all their friends—and maybe Jemuel, too. After this, he might volunteer for the Masada Run himself. Esther wouldn’t want that. “Let’s go.”
The only possible coffin is Esther’s damaged scout. They can’t use it any longer, and it’s one less thing she and Abel will have to explain to the authorities on Kismet. Abel carries Esther’s body back to the docking bay and sets her back into the bloodied mess of her cockpit. As he checks the instrumentation, Noemi leans over Esther and brushes a few stray locks of hair from her face.
“Here,” she whispers as she folds Esther’s hands around Noemi’s own rosary. Esther wasn’t Catholic, but it’s all Noemi has to give. “I love you.”
If Abel thinks speaking to the dead is ridiculous, he gives no sign. He simply sets the scout ship’s controls as the Daedalus soars closer to Kismet’s star. They both leave the docking bay so the air lock can be sealed but, without being asked, Abel instantly brings up the image of the star on the nearest wall monitor.
Noemi feels the small shudder deep within the ship as the rover launches. She ought to pray, she knows, but she can’t even find the heart for that. Within moments, a tiny streak lances through the dark sky around Kismet’s sun. For one split second, Esther’s coffin is a dark speck against that brightness—and then it’s gone.
Now she’s sunshine, Noemi thinks. Tears well in her eyes, but she blinks fast, refusing to let them fall.
Glancing sideways, she sees Abel studying her while trying very hard to look as if he isn’t. There’s something about Abel that’s almost too intelligent. Too knowing. He’s less like a device, more like another person. And his idea of burying Esther within a star showed something so close to compassion.…
But no. Abel’s supposed kindness must be like the rest of his careful programming and his pleasing appearance: a disguise meant to deceive. Noemi can’t afford to forget that this is merely a machine, one she can use to save her world.
“All right,” she says hoarsely. “On to Kismet.”
He hesitates, then replies, “My estimates of your mission prep time and flight time to the Gate are necessarily inexact. However, I know that the battle with the Damocles ship, our first encounter aboard the Daedalus”—encounter, how tactful—“and everything that has happened since has taken long enough that I’d estimate that you’ve been awake for at least twenty-four hours straight. In addition, you have been under considerable physical and emotional stress. You are no longer in prime operating condition. Please reconsider your decision to go without sleep.”
Noemi pauses. “You don’t change course. You don’t send any communications. You don’t do anything that I haven’t expressly ordered you to do unless it’s necessary to keep the ship from being destroyed. Those are your orders. You’ll obey them?”
“Of course.”
Without another word, she turns and walks back up the corridor, around the long swirl of the spiral, until she reaches the first set of crew quarters. It’s a small bedroom, military stark. Suits Noemi fine. She activates the lock, flops down on the bed fully dressed in her exosuit, and falls asleep almost before she closes her eyes.
Noemi barely has time to realize how good it feels to let go. To leave everything to Abel for a while.
12
ABEL CAN’T SABOTAGE NOEMI VIDAL’S EFFORTS OR DIS-obey her orders, nor does he intend to try… but he has to admit, she wasn’t wrong to wonder about his intentions. Although he can’t work against her, he can act on his own initiative in other ways. Nor is he required to tell her he’s doing so.
He’d smile at the thought of outwitting her, were he not so focused as he walks to the ship’s small engine room, which contains a secondary communications console. He can’t call for help, can’t do anything else that would put Noemi at risk, but he can finally satisfy the curiosity that has burned so brightly within him for the past thirty years.
As soon as he’s at the engine room comms console, he runs a search for the name Burton Mansfield. Instantly the ship begins reaching out to the satellites and ships in the Kismet system, gleaning whatever information it can find.
Will his creator have died? Did he perish escaping the Daedalus? Thirty years later, Abel still cannot bear not knowing. When the screen lights up, his breath catches in his throat—a human reflex, one that survives deep in his human DNA.
The results he sees don’t tell Abel as much as the results that he doesn’t. No obituaries or memorials are shown, and a person of Mansfield’s stature would surely have received many after his death. Therefore, Mansfield is alive.
It doesn’t matter that Abel will never get to see him again, not compared to the fact that his creator has survived. The emotion this knowledge inspires—this transcendent inner light—is that joy? Abel hopes so. He has wanted to feel joy at least once.
He wishes he could at least inform Mansfield of his fate. Even though Mansfield is unlikely to be able to provide any sort of rescue, Abel would like to tell his creator, his “father,” about his many years of solitude and the strange changes within his thought and emotion matrices. The information might prove useful in future cybernetics experiments.
However, there’s very little information about precisely what Burton Mansfield is currently doing. No press releases have been issued for quite some time. No conferences. The last new paper appears to have been published almost a decade ago. Of course Mansfield must now be elderly by human standards; probably he’s enjoying a well-deserved retirement. But it’s strange to think about him growing old while Abel has stayed so nearly the same.
Nor does Mansfield appear to have made any significant advances in cybernetics. Abel calls up the current specs and sees that the same twenty-five models of mech are still in production, Baker through Zebra. Appearances have been tweaked, with new hairstyles and body proportions to reflect changes in taste, and apparently fixes have been applied to patch old flaws and vulnerabilities. The fundamentals of strengths, skills, and intelligence remain the same.
This is useful tactical information for Abel to have. However, he finds himself gratified on a level that has nothing to do with any rational purpose. As the screen projects soft green light on his face, he even smiles.
Mansfield has never made another mech as intelligent as Abel. Nor one as skilled, or as capable of learning. In other words, Mansfield has never tried to replace him.
Noemi Vidal may destroy Abel, but she can’t take this one truth away from him: He remains Mansfield’s ultimate creation.