“Yeah, well, you’re going to be the mech who saved Genesis. That makes a difference.” Noemi spins her seat around, leaning toward him with no doubt in her eyes, only delight. “We’ll explain what you are, in every way. That you’re unique, irreplaceable. And the hero of Genesis can begin getting to know his new home.”
Abel suspects it may not be as simple as Noemi imagines. However, he also knows that putting this question to the planetary leaders right after the destruction of the Gate will give them a strong chance of success. If they fail to win him a place on Genesis—
—then he will fly away in this nameless ship and try to find another fate to call his own. And he will go on for the rest of his many days knowing that he saved Noemi along with her world. It’s enough.
“Will your world detect our entry into the system?”
Noemi nods. “They’ll see us on long-range scans. They’ll come to investigate within the day, but by then we’ll be done, won’t we?” Then her face pales. “Unless—the Masada Run—how long do we have?”
His fingers move quickly along the console as he measures, then smiles. “We still have approximately forty hours until the Masada Run is scheduled to begin, assuming no changes in plans since your departure.”
She laughs in relief as she spins her seat in a circle, arms outstretched. “They’re going to throw us a parade. Wait and see.”
They get to work immediately. In sick bay, they open up the cryopod and remove the inert Queen model. Before she can cycle out of dormancy mode, Abel inputs new codes that will establish Noemi as her commander, as well as shut down all unnecessary mental functions. The Queen has already deleted her advanced programming, already chosen to be something instead of someone; Abel has no qualms about using her for this mission, and knows Noemi doesn’t either. But the fewer potential complications, the better.
The Queen follows them obediently to the docking bay, where they ready Noemi’s fighter for its final flight. “Power is more than adequate,” he says, checking the data readouts. “This ship could fly to Genesis, come back again, and still be able to complete the mission.”
“No need for that,” Noemi says to the Queen, who stands as expressionless as a mannequin. “You’ll follow the flight plan given to reach the center of the Gate.”
“Affirmative,” the Queen replies. Even her voice inflection has been lost. She is more of an it now.
When instructed, the Queen takes its seat. No flight helmet is needed; it can do without air for the brief time it will remain operational. Finally, Abel picks up the thermomagnetic device. A few quick turns of the controls, and it will be activated, ready to do its work. Within minutes, it will be too hot for a human to touch, too hot for a mech thereafter. But by then destruction will be seconds away.
Abel meets Noemi’s eyes. “Ready?”
“Ready.” She nods once.
He turns the controls. The device begins to vibrate in his hands. The low hum seems to electrify the room as he sets it in the fighter—
—and the Queen model goes dead.
“Wait. What happened?” Noemi tugs at the Queen’s collar as the mech flops to one side, completely inert. Abel shuts off the thermomagnetic device instantly, to conserve energy. This changes nothing for the Queen model, which is unsurprising; there’s no reason it should react to thermomagnetic functions.
But then why did it go dead the moment he turned the device on?
Correlation is not causation, he reminds himself. Yet the part of his mind that has developed instincts tells him this is no coincidence.
“What’s wrong with her?” Noemi asks. “Was it something about the cryosleep? Dormancy mode?”
“No. That should have no effect, and all my preliminary scans were normal.” Abel scans the Queen again to see nothing. No mental action whatsoever, and even organic life functions have shut down. This kind of catastrophic failure is almost unknown, particularly in a mech that checked out only minutes before. In order for that to happen—
He stops moving. Stops thinking. Instead he is overcome by the chagrin of knowing that he has underestimated Burton Mansfield one last time.
“A fail-safe.” Abel sets down the scanner. “The Queen was programmed with a fail-safe.”
Noemi grabs his arm, dismay turning to fear. “What kind of fail-safe?”
“I don’t know the first element. Probably it was ‘proximity to a Gate.’ But the second element was ‘proximity to an operational thermomagnetic device.’” Turning to Noemi, he explains, “That’s what our mission was about, thirty years ago. Finding the vulnerabilities in a Gate. We found one. And Mansfield took steps to patch that security breach.”
“But how could he have known we would try it with this Queen model?” she protests.
“He didn’t. Therefore, the only explanation is that he installed the fail-safe on every model of mech in existence sophisticated enough to handle the piloting tasks. Every single one.” Abel would like to be angry with Mansfield again, but instead he feels only a muted sense of admiration. His creator has proved selfish, unfeeling, even cruel—but his intelligence cannot be doubted. “As the head of the Mansfield Cybernetics line, as soon as he devised the fail-safe, he could have seen it downloaded or installed on every mech in the galaxy.”
Noemi’s voice shakes. “So you’re telling me we have nothing.”
Abel can only reply, “Nothing at all.”
39
NOTHING.
It’s all been for nothing.
Noemi slumps against the side of her battle-scarred silver fighter, torn between grief and rage. This entire journey—everything she’s been through, everything that’s been lost—she’s told herself it has a purpose. The racking fevers of Cobweb, the terror of being hunted by the Queen and Charlie, Abel’s abduction, and, worst of all, Esther’s death: Noemi has endured because she knew that was the cost of saving her world.
But her world can’t be saved. She’s been chasing a mirage from the start.
“You’re sure that’s true for all mechs everywhere?” She will not cry. She will not. “Every single one of them that could fly the fighter?”
Abel looks up from the dead Queen model. “Almost certainly. Maybe a handful of mechs were never updated with the fail-safe, but they would by definition be located in out-of-the-way places. They’d be difficult to find and even more difficult to identify. The odds of finding one in time would be… You don’t want to hear the odds, do you?”
“No. I understand. It’s impossible.”
So she’ll go home. She has forty hours to see her friends and make her peace, and say good-bye to her life. Then she’ll rejoin her friends on her flight squad for the Masada Run.
At least she’ll die knowing she bought Genesis some time. And if nothing else, she saved Abel.
“That’s it, then.” Noemi’s voice betrays her, cracking on the last word, but she keeps going. “The plan won’t work. It’s over.”
Abel says, “Not if you use me.”
It takes a few seconds to sink in. “You can’t.”