“That’s not a realistic hypothesis,” Abel says.
Virginia shoots him a look over her shoulder. “I know, Abel, don’t trip a breaker. It’s just an expression. This is weird, is all I’m saying.”
Abel nods to show her he understands—he always did, of course—but it appears that even the deepest grief can manifest as irritability. He must take this into account when dealing with unhappy humans in the future. “We have to determine whether or not the ship still exists. Burton Mansfield and Noemi were almost certainly on board.”
“How can you know for sure?” Fon asks from her place on a nearby floor cushion, hugging her knees to her chest.
“Burton urged me to find him there. Logically he would’ve taken Noemi with him to the ship immediately after leaving Earth.”
Ludwig points out, “He might have gone somewhere else, planning to join the Osiris later.”
“Burton Mansfield is in very poor health. His body is frail, and he requires mech assistance for almost all daily activities.” Mansfield’s papery skin, the veins showing through in soft blue. “He could send mechs or trusted associates to take care of any other business.” Abel, my boy. “Therefore Mansfield would minimize travel, going directly to the Osiris, which may well have been destroyed.”
All his concern, fear, and grief ought to belong to Noemi. She’s the only one who should matter, the only one he wants to save. But Directive One remains insistent within him, demanding that he care about Mansfield, too. Even now. Always.
“Destroyed by nothing, leaving behind nothing?” Virginia says. “No way. Think this over, Abel. Your emotions are clouding your judgment, which is kind of exciting in terms of the evolution of your psyche, but it’s not helping us analyze the situation. So maybe dial down your human side for a minute.”
My emotions are clouding my judgment, Abel thinks. At any other time, this revelation might be wonderful to him. For the moment he can only refocus himself.
“Do we know where the Osiris was headed?” asks tiny Fon.
“Irrelevant,” Abel replies. “We can only speculate whether Remedy flew the Osiris along its original course or diverted it to another destination. So we have to analyze the data to determine its course and extrapolate from that.”
Pointing at one corner of the screen, Ludwig zooms in on it. “Do you see the blur here? That doesn’t look like a problem with the Persephone’s sensors. It looks like a distortion field at work.”
“Mansfield has used distortion fields in the past,” Abel says. “Mostly to camouflage deep-space mech facilities, particularly those near the Genesis Gate in the earlier days of the Liberty War, when Genesis troops sometimes came through to fight in the Earth system.”
Virginia lights up. When she gets a new idea, it’s like setting fire to a fuse. “Speaking of Gates, these energy readings—don’t they kind of look like a ship passing through a Gate?”
Fon makes a scoffing sound. “Come on. There’s no Gate out there.”
“The size and intensity of a distortion field that could eclipse a Gate completely, beyond any detection—that’s far beyond anything Mansfield has done in the past,” Abel says. A Gate requires more than a visual screen. “Massive energy readings also have to be concealed. Such concealment is difficult to begin with and grows exponentially greater with the size of the object to be concealed.”
“The distortion field didn’t conceal all the energy readings,” Virginia insists. “Yeah, this is like the mini-pocket-baby version of Gate-transport readings, but maybe that’s all that bleeds through.”
Abel sticks to mathematical realities and probabilities for the time being. Math is comforting. It is rational and unchanging. His emotions cannot cloud his math. When he runs the numbers, it becomes increasingly clear that she has a point.
“Could Mansfield build a field that size?” Virginia presses. “You know him better than just about anyone, Abel. We all know he’s got the money and the power. And he’s definitely got the brain. Does he have the—drive, I guess you’d call it?”
Drive. Will. Purpose. Mansfield broke every law of cybernetics to build himself another home for his soul. He joined in the building of that enormous ship for some grand purpose still unknown, at a cost that must total in the billions of credits. When Abel filters this through his knowledge of his creator, the probabilities shift. “He does. He could.”
“Earth built another Gate without telling anyone?” Ludwig scowls at the screen as if demanding answers from it. “That would mean they’ve found another habitable world.”
Fon chimes in, “Not necessarily. They could be exploring something else, like a system with materials we need, even if humans can’t live there.”
“Or they built an artificial planet somewhere,” Virginia says. She’s playing with a lock of her red-streaked hair, eager and alight. “It could be a massive space station, maybe. Even a Dyson sphere! Something really flash, you know?”
“Any such structures may well have defenses,” Abel says.
How would those defenses react to the Osiris arriving under Remedy control? Would they negotiate or shoot to kill? Not to mention, such security would mean Noemi is in a prison—no, a fortress. Rescuing her would be extremely difficult.
But not impossible.
Ludwig hesitantly says, “You mentioned—you said that Genesis was under attack? Earth used biological weapons?”
“Cobweb was disseminated planetwide,” Abel confirms. “Possibly the virus was modified to be both more contagious and more deadly.”
The Razers all stare at one another, stricken to a degree that surprises Abel. He doesn’t doubt their horror at the use of biological weapons, but their reaction seems more… personal.
Fon speaks up first. “That’s going to be level 110.”
“I think Ricardo works down there sometimes,” Virginia murmurs. “Mei, too.”
Only then does it occur to Abel that the
