“Its orbit and rotation suggest minimal variations in the seasons,” Abel adds. “I’d guess the average temperature fluctuates less than two degrees Celsius through the year.”
This is the chilliest of the habitable worlds yet discovered. Stronghold is cold, but still warmer than this—just as lower Scandinavia is warmer than northern Alaska on Earth. Stronghold’s arid surface makes snow extremely rare. Here, the atmosphere has enough humidity for blizzards and frosts. While the oceans he sees are smaller than those on Earth, they’re still vast enough to provide ample moisture for this world. Fish likely dwell within those oceans, and trees adapted to the chill will produce fruit even in a snowy springtime.
This splendor they see matters little, compared to what they’re not seeing. Abel says, “Can you detect the Osiris? I’m not picking it up on my sensors.”
“Mine neither—though we know it’s been here.” She hits a panel on her console that makes hazy lines of orange appear on the starfield in front of them, crossing the new planet’s white surface. The ionized trails mark the Osiris’s path. “Looks to me like they landed, terrorists and all.”
“Do you think we should scan the surface?” Abel is careful not to give Virginia orders. Unlike Harriet or Zayan, she is not his employee, and her ego is sturdy enough to sometimes outweigh her good heart. As the possessor of a healthy ego himself, Abel understands how inconvenient it can be.
Virginia responds to the suggestion as swiftly as she would’ve rejected a command. Within moments, the screen fills with the image of the Osiris… or what was once the Osiris, and is now only a wreck.
“Oh, crap,” Virginia says, even as she zooms in tighter on the image. “But—that looks survivable to me. Right?”
“I think so.”
Abel feels oddly bifurcated. Half of his brain performs the necessary calculations, projects a scenario in which the pilot of the Osiris failed to account for the gravitational pulls of so many different moons at once, and is content to have solved the logical puzzle. The other half feels as though he has been plunged underwater for an hour or two, as long as his cybernetic lungs can hold out, and his body is now screaming for air as desperately as any human’s.
Stay alive, Noemi, he thinks. Stay alive.
He doesn’t send the same message to Mansfield, but Directive One ensures he has to look for his creator, too.
“I’ll go down and search the surface. Look for Noemi, see if there are any survivors.” He doesn’t mention Mansfield by name.
“Whoa, whoa, hang on.” Virginia spins her chair around to face him. “What’s this talk about ‘I’? We’re a team, remember?”
“Any surviving members of Remedy or ship passengers will be desperate for an intact spacecraft. The Persephone should remain in orbit at all times, with a pilot aboard, to ensure it isn’t stolen.”
She crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Then why don’t you stay while I go?”
“Because I am physically stronger, better able to operate in conditions of extreme cold, more powerfully motivated, and have greater mental capacity than you.”
After a long, flat stare, Virginia says, “You really have zero concept of tact.”
“I understand it. But I prefer honesty.” He’d felt Virginia, who is well informed about cybernetics, would be able to accept these simple truths. Instead perhaps some nuance is called for. “You are of course extremely intelligent, given the limitations of a human brain.”
“Stick with the ego, buddy. You suck at tact.” Her mood has improved, but her position hasn’t. “What if you get yourself blown up? Going alone is dangerous, Abel!”
“This entire mission is dangerous. The relative increase in risk upon leaving the ship is irrelevant.”
At last Virginia sighs. “Fine.” As Abel gets to his feet, she adds, “But I’m monitoring you the whole way!”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
A few minutes later, the launching bay doors open and Abel flies Virginia’s corsair down toward the surface, spiraling in a long arc. The moons’ gravity wells tug at him like spiders crawling along their webs toward trapped prey, but he keeps the ship steady. Quickly the snowy planet becomes Abel’s entire sky.
The Osiris stands out even from a great distance, its gold-and-terra-cotta surface vivid against the pristine snow. Although it crashed into the surface, leaving a kilometer-long gash of broken trees and upturned soil, the ship’s structure appears largely intact. Abel readjusts his assessment of the crash. Assuming internal shock absorption and artificial gravity functions remained operational, most of the passengers are likely to have survived.
Noemi is alive. Probably she’s alive. And she’s strong enough, enterprising enough, to endure the aftermath of something like this—
He pushes away the thought. Even hope can’t be allowed to ruin his focus. For now, he has to determine how best to infiltrate the wreck of the Osiris.
Abel brings the corsair in closer, swooping low to the ground until he’s skimming just above the treetops and rolling hills. The conifers here grow dark blue needles instead of green, but otherwise they’re not so different from pine trees on Earth. In the near distance, a spectacular mountain range scrapes the pale sky. Soon, the sunset will filter between the peaks. A waterfall flows down one of the nearer mountains, its crest framed by a shell of ice the color of beach glass. The path of that river can be traced to a large lake that borders a broad plain, which seems likely to be the planned site of the first human settlement; a large structure shows up on his sensors, but absent any life signs, so it’s not important to investigate it at this time. While animal life is abundant in this planet’s oceans, relatively few species live on land, and the air is occupied primarily by pale gray clouds of what seems to be some kind of marsupial bat. Everything about this planet appears both beautiful and benign. Abel understands why people would hope to settle here, why they would consider living with the omnipresent cold a small price to pay.
What he
