An entire ship remained hidden in that debris for thirty years, until Noemi discovered it, and inside she found—
“You seeing that?” Ganaraj’s voice comes over the speaker just as her screen brings up the Gate in greater detail. The faint shimmer in the middle of the ring has taken on a familiar, ominous look—a cloudiness like a pond about to frost over.
“Yeah, I see it,” Noemi says.
“It might be nothing.” Ganaraj sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. “Doesn’t always mean something’s about to come through.”
“Usually doesn’t,” Noemi agrees as she zooms in tighter on the image and sets her weapons to ready. Segments of old wreckage and shrapnel from past battles often create the illusion of incoming traffic. Even a faint hint of intrusion is danger enough to set her on edge.
“Or it could be a bunch of mechs coming through to dice us all.” O’Farrell makes herself sound happy about it, so happy the sarcasm is unmistakable. “But you’ll just want to give them milk and cookies and send them home again, won’t you, Vidal?”
“Pack it, O’Farrell,” Noemi snaps back.
“Well, that’s what you do, isn’t it? You love mechs sooooo much that you’d rather leave Genesis exposed to war and death than destroy a freakin’ hunk of metal—”
Ganaraj cuts in. “Could we pay attention to the Gate, everybody?”
“Never stopped,” Noemi says. But her cheeks feel like they’re burning, and her pulse throbs angrily in her temples. She can handle it when they pick on her, but not when they turn on Abel.
When she found that ship six months ago, she also found the mech inside it: Mansfield Cybernetics Model 1A, the pet project of the one and only Burton Mansfield, and the single most advanced mech ever created.
Model 1A prefers to be known as Abel.
At first, Noemi saw him the same way everyone else on Genesis does: a machine fashioned in the shape of a human but with no soul inside. An enemy, one she could use before destroying. He was the tool that could blow up the Genesis Gate—sealing Genesis safely away from Earth forever, winning the war in one split-second blast.
However, blowing up the Gate would’ve meant blowing up Abel with it, and by the end of their journey through the colony worlds of the Loop, Noemi knew that Abel was far more than a machine. She could no more have killed him to destroy the Gate than she could’ve sacrificed a child on an altar.
God asked for that once, whisper her old catechism lessons. She’s getting better at ignoring those. Maybe too much better—
Red lights flash on her starfighter console. Noemi’s hands tighten on the controls as she spots the signal. “We’ve got something coming through.”
By now, though, their sensors are telling them the same thing. “Confirmed,” says Ganaraj, fear threading through his voice. “But it’s not a Damocles.”
“A scout ship,” O’Farrell suggests. “Getting advance intel before the Queens and Charlies come through.”
“Since when do mechs use scout ships?” Noemi zooms in tighter on the intruding ship.
No. Not a ship. Something else.
The metal object is shaped into meter-long delicate points that extend in every direction from the small spherical center. To herself she whispers, “It’s like a star”—the way she pictured them as a child, pretty and shining, not monstrous and powerful. The prettiness makes it more ominous.
“Is it a bomb?” Ganaraj asks.
Noemi knows it’s not. She can’t say why she knows it, but she does. Call it intuition.
O’Farrell provides more concrete confirmation: “Scans negative for explosives.”
The Gate shimmers once more, and another star bursts through. Then another. As Noemi stares, the stars keep multiplying until her sensors give her a final count of a hundred and twenty. They rush through space, a constellation as brilliant as it is terrifying, streaking toward Genesis.
“Inform command, and let’s stay on them,” Ganaraj orders. He’s been a lieutenant nine weeks longer than Noemi has. “The second we get clearance, we’re blasting these things to oblivion.”
Noemi would blast them now and trust that clearance would follow later. There’s less than no chance that Captain Baz and the other higher-ups are going to allow anything from Earth to get close to home—explosives or not. But Ganaraj is in charge, and Noemi’s on thin ice, so she grits her teeth and flies tight on the stars as long as she can—
—which isn’t that long, because they’re spreading out, widening the distances between them. When the stars first emerged from the Gate, Noemi’s three-fighter patrol could have destroyed them in a quick spray of blaster fire. Every second that elapses makes targeting more difficult and time-consuming. The stars zip through the solar system, miniature mag engines making them glow bright in the darkness, traveling fast enough to reach Genesis within fifteen minutes. Noemi scans the “stars” nonstop and knows the others are doing the same. The results on her screen reveal nothing about what these things are or what they could mean.
Maybe they’re peace offerings, she thinks. It’s a private joke. There’s no way Earth would make an offer, not now. The situation in the larger galaxy has grown more dire than ever. Earth won’t be habitable much longer, and the other colony of the worlds can only house so many more millions of people; that leaves billions who need a place to live, billions who would destroy her world the same way they destroyed their own. The Liberty War began thirty years ago because her people realized they had a moral, religious duty to protect their planet.
Despite their lower technological reserves, they held out for decades, even enjoying a period of relative quiet. But in the past few years, Earth has resumed the fight with a vengeance. Genesis is the only prize worth claiming—anywhere, for anyone.
“Ganaraj,” she says. “They’re getting too far apart.”
“Regulations state—” Ganaraj breaks off. “We have clearance. Take these things down.”
Four and a half
