“Don’t suppose Mansfield or his daughter could get into the computer system and help us,” Noemi grumbles.
“Well, they can’t do everything,” Delphine says, as though reasoning with a small child.
“They’ve done enough,” Noemi agrees.
“I feel so sorry for them,” Delphine confides as they hurry down the hallway to the next bend. “This must be even worse for them than it is for us.”
“Why? Because being rich and powerful is such a burden?”
Delphine gives Noemi a look. “Because of Dr. Shearer’s son, Mansfield’s grandson. I think his name was Simon? Anyway, he died about four months ago, from Cobweb complications. Only seven years old.”
After a pause, Noemi says, “That’s terrible,” and she means it. She remembers Cobweb’s blistering fevers, the sickly sweet delirium that dizzied her, the utter exhaustion that made it impossible to even walk. She thinks of the suffering she witnessed on Genesis—Mrs. Gatson’s feeble coughing, the groaning patients lying helpless on the ground. Noemi would never wish such misery on an innocent child.
But grief should be, among other things, a call to compassion—a chance to recognize the pain in others’ hearts mirrored in your own. It doesn’t seem to have had that effect on either Mansfield or Gillian Shearer.
The Osiris has few corners; most corridors bend in gradual arcs. As their group takes the curve leading to the baggage stores, Noemi stops short in horror. Her first thought is massacre, but then she sees the wires poking from the severed limbs and torsos.
Dozens of mechs lie jumbled on the ground, all of them sliced down by blaster fire. A few of them aren’t totally inactive; a Yoke keeps trying to brush away the detritus near where she lies, even though her hand has only two fingers left. A Baker stares up at the ceiling, blinking, his face passive. They’re all broken beyond repair.
Noemi’s destroyed plenty of mechs in battle. They aren’t like Abel—aren’t people. Yet the sight of so many mangled limbs unsettles her.
If Remedy’s fighters can do this to things that look human, does it make it easier for them to kill actual humans?
After securing the baggage area with a few makeshift trip wires, and grabbing as many edibles as they can carry, Noemi and her group make their way back to the mech tanks. The presence of Shearer and Mansfield makes this room their de facto headquarters, so this is where they’ll need to take stock.
As the others begin bickering over whose box of chocolates is whose, distributing luxury clothing around, Noemi walks away to catch her breath. Mansfield sits in his chair, giving no orders, saying nothing, not even to Gillian, who’s hard at work at a nearby terminal. He appears profoundly shaken, and Noemi knows why.
“Abel will never find us,” she says.
Mansfield looks up at her, his face gone even paler. “You don’t know that.” His voice is hardly more than a whisper. “He has the intelligence to—to extrapolate from existing evidence—”
“What evidence? There’s no ship for him to find. Remedy even blew away the station where the ship had been. Then we flew through a Gate nobody in the galaxy knows about, one you must’ve hidden with some kind of distortion field, and now we’re headed to a planet that’s been kept so secret Abel would never, ever hear a word of it.” She leans closer, every word as sharp as a knife’s point. “You failed. Abel lives.”
“That means you die.” But Mansfield’s threat has no venom to it. He’s nearly broken, facing mortality as he must never have done before. Death will demand its due of him after all—and before too long.
“If I die, then I die to save both Genesis and Abel. That’s fine with me.”
Noemi walks away from him, between tall columns of mech tanks, half-expecting to feel the hot spur of pain in her arm at any moment. When the ampule blows, the poison will enter her body, and that’s it. But Gillian Shearer keeps working hard at her terminal, not distracted by the strangeness around them. Apparently Noemi’s death will have to wait until later.
One of the items grabbed from the baggage area was a ship entertainment device, portable within the hull. Delphine has set it in her lap and is eagerly tapping away at the screen. Her priorities could use some work. But she’s the one passenger who’s still friendly to Noemi, so maybe that lack of perspective is worth something. Noemi comes up and looks at the screen, which shows a list of available holos, at least half of which seem to star Han Zhi. “You’re… searching for something to watch,” she says slowly. “Now. With all this going on.”
“No, not yet. See, I had this idea.” Delphine points at the top of the screen, at a label reading OTHER ENTERTAINMENT OPTIONS. “Remedy locked down all the essential systems, right? Entertainment isn’t essential, so that’s still open to us. These portables are still hooked into the computer. And one of the options on the entertainment channels is FLIGHT PROGRESS. So if we go in here—” Jabbing at the screen a couple more times, she brings up a diagram of the star system that shows the Osiris clearly just shy of Haven. A small square over to one side shows the view from the principal bridge screen, in which a white-and-blue world surrounded by many moons grows larger by the second.
“That’s brilliant, Delphine,” Noemi says sincerely. Just because nobody’s ever asked this woman to use her brain before doesn’t mean she doesn’t have one. Her admiration shifts into dismay as she begins realizing what’s on this screen. “How many moons does Haven have?”
“Fifteen! All of them in fairly close orbit, a couple of them nearly
