At least the Queen and Charlie couldn’t catch up to them; neither of their ships can be put into overload again. Even knowing this, Noemi’s spent the entire voyage across the Cray system scanning the area around them, over and over, expecting to see an enemy ship at any second.
Now she braces her hands against the ops console as the Daedalus approaches the horizon of the Gate. Noemi feels the bizarre tug of gravity begin and shuts her eyes tight.
We’ll make it or we won’t, she thinks as the forces begin to pull at her. She tries to let go. To accept whatever comes.
When the strange sensations fade, she breathes out a sigh of relief, opens her eyes, and gasps in terror.
Asteroids and debris surround them, even denser than the minefield. And instead of black space, brilliant cloud-like color surrounds them like hallucinogenic fog. There’s too much light, not enough room to move. The ship could be crushed at any moment.
“Shields,” Abel says, but Noemi’s hands are already at the controls. Although the shields have already been raised, she’ll need to shift their strength from zone to zone, to make sure they have maximum protection from every potential collision. That requires calculations almost too swift for the human brain to handle.
She can do this. She knows that. But she needs to joke about it, or else the fear will make her hands shake, and that tremble alone could kill them. “You handled this pretty well yourself last time.”
Abel’s hands move across the pilot’s console at mech speed, almost a blur. “The mines were predictable. The asteroids are not. Piloting is therefore more difficult.”
On the viewscreen, hundreds of obstacles rotate around them at crazy angles and vectors, their sizes and speeds varying, every single one of them capable of smashing the Daedelus into space dust. Keeping her voice light, Noemi says, “Thought your super-superior brain could handle a few extra calculations.”
“Yes. However, I only have two hands. A slight design flaw.”
She laughs once. In the back of her mind, she registers the sarcasm, the joke, everything Abel’s said and done in the past hour that no mech should ever be able to do—but there’s no time to think about it. To concentrate on anything besides shifting their shield strength, so often and so fast that it’s as much instinct as calculation.
As Abel begins easing the ship into a less crowded area, Noemi dares to take a deeper breath—
—until she realizes they’re caught in a vector where three different asteroids of considerable size are coming at them at once. No matter which way Abel moves, they’re about to take a hit.
He sees it, too, of course. “I’m directing us toward the smallest one. Full shield strength there on my mark.”
Noemi hits the controls, but even the best shields can’t stop a projectile that size. The impact nearly knocks her from her seat, and red lights blossom all over the control panels as the entire ship shudders.
They’re still in one piece. But how long are they going to stay that way?
“I’m setting us down,” Abel says. “There’s an asteroid at the edge of the debris field large enough for us to land on.”
She breathes out and closes her eyes. They’re saved… for now.
At least the Daedelus’s landing systems remain intact. As the asteroid in question looms larger on the viewscreen, Noemi feels the ship tether itself. They’re able to dip beneath an outcropping and take shelter, giving the shields a break. Abel nestles them neatly within the safest space, and at last they settle back on more-or-less solid ground.
“Good job,” Noemi says.
Abel turns to her, apparently still not used to being thanked. But he says only, “Let’s inspect the ship.”
The good news is that the Daedalus can still take off and land. It can still move through a Gate. Those are the main things. However, their shields are a mess.
“We need the shields,” Noemi says as she and Abel work in engineering. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in the pink T-shirt and leggings she borrowed from Virginia, which won’t get returned anytime soon. “I don’t think we can even make it back to the Blind Gate in one piece without them.”
“Agreed.” Abel keeps gazing at her exposed shoulder, though she can’t imagine why. He looks as ridiculous as she does, in Ludwig’s oversize athletic gear. Both of them are barefoot.
Scans of the system reveal that the Blind Gate leads to a planet that does, in fact, have surface water and a breathable atmosphere. No wonder scientists thought it would be ideal for colonization. Its star system lies within the last wisps of a nebula, where even space is streaked with rainbows. However, sometime between the initial scans and the Gate’s construction, its two moons collided, creating a debris field too dangerous for ships to fly through. Even if colonization vessels could’ve landed on that planet’s surface, meteors will crash down for millennia to come.
At least the Daedalus is safe here. Even if the Queen and Charlie come through searching for them, they’ll assume Noemi and Abel were destroyed within moments. Noemi still finds it hard to believe they weren’t.
All thanks to Abel, she thinks.
He remains oblivious to her inner turmoil. “Fortunately, we have everything we need to conduct repairs. It will take some time, but it can be done.”
“How much time?”
Abel shrugs. “The work itself will take only a matter of hours. However, after repairing each surface zone, we’ll have to allow the system to reset before moving on.”
On Cray, she’d been trying to count the days. It had seemed as if they had so much time, and now—“How long?” she says. “From starting repairs to going back through the Gate. In Genesis time, if you can figure that out.”
“Two more days.” Abel cocks his head. “Why does that concern you so?”
“Remember how I’m trying to save my planet?” She shouldn’t have snapped at him—especially given his role in her plan. But the nightmarish past few hours have honed her temper to a sharp edge.
He clasps his hands behind his back, more formal than he’s been with her since day one. “Your agitation suggests that you believe Genesis can only be saved within a very short time frame, although this makes no logical sense. You’ve also spoken about something taking place within twenty days. To what are you referring?”
Only a day or two ago, telling him this would’ve been unimaginable. Now, however, Noemi knows she needs to give Abel the entire truth. “The Masada Run.”