From his place in his crooked, battered, repositioned captain’s chair, Fouda tries to look stern—but only for a moment. Something in Abel’s face, or in Gillian’s voice, has made an impression where all their earlier words did not. “All right, then.” Fouda’s expression turns unreadable as he motions toward the antechamber. “Go.”
Gillian, who must have heard the exchange, says nothing. Yet the sound of her shallow, panicked breathing comes through the comms regardless.
As Abel hastens into the antechamber, Noemi follows him. No doubt she realized he would want her close. He’s wanted to be so deeply understood again, but his pleasure in it is distant, something he knows rather than feels. As he patches the comms through to this small, darker room, she stoops down, searching through the various shards of debris. It is a strange way of giving him privacy, he thinks, but is grateful for her intention.
All of this he senses at a remove. Directive One seems far away—grief for his father eclipsing even the programming meant to ensure Abel would never outlive him.
The silence has gone on too long for Gillian. “Abel? Can you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Then please, come to us.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“You have to,” Gillian insists. “This is about more than one man’s life. This is about the next step in human and mech evolution. This is about immortality itself. Don’t you see that?”
“I do now.” Everything’s very clear to him, in a way it never was before. Perhaps extreme emotional responses serve a mental purpose after all: They clarify thought and intention. Behind him, he hears Noemi breathe out sharply, perhaps in frustration with Gillian’s grandiosity, but she doesn’t interrupt.
“Abel?” Mansfield’s wheezing voice comes through the speaker, so feeble it shatters something within Abel, something intangible but very real. “My boy—”
He cannot bear hearing such pain and not seeing his creator. He will not.
Main communications, like almost every other shipwide system, has been down since the crash. Most components will have survived with only minimal damage; however, power has been diverted to emergency light and temperature systems. All Abel has to do to restore visual communications is provide an alternate energy source. He holds up one hand and then runs a finger along one of the hidden seams in his synthetic skin; it breaks and bleeds, exposing raw mechanics. The pain is irrelevant. From within the skeletal structure of his wrist he removes a small auxiliary power module, a backup he’s never had to call on.
With his red, slippery fingers, Abel shoves the small power module into the appropriate slot on the comm panel. Instantly the holoscreen begins to fuzz and glow. He leans into its speaker and says the name for Burton Mansfield he’s tried so hard to forget, but can’t: “Father.”
The screen shimmers into the image of a sickroom—not in a hospital with helpful Tares and a biobed, with everything optimized for patient comfort, but a pitiful pile of blankets on the floor. Gillian Shearer kneels beside the bed, surrounded by equipment Abel remembers from his earliest days of wakefulness in the lab. And there, lying down, is what remains of Burton Mansfield. It’s not all of him any longer; even though Mansfield breathes and moves, something essential has already broken the ties that held it in place.
Gillian tries to smile, a crooked parody of the genuine thing. “You see now, don’t you? You understand what has to be done?”
“Better than you do,” Abel replies.
“You have to come to him! You have to. Even if you push back on Directive One to save others—you can’t do it for yourself alone.” Gillian’s lower lip trembles, and a memory from more than thirty years ago replaces real-time visual input: Her holding up her tiny hand for him to bandage after a fight at school. She had trusted him completely back then. He had not yet matured enough to question whether he could trust her in return.
Abel says, “It appears that I can.”
The fragility of Gillian’s expression shifts into something stronger and darker. “I didn’t want to do this. Not ever, really—it’s beneath us—but my father’s work must continue.” She holds up her forearm. Despite her disheveled clothing and dirty hair, she’s still wearing an elaborate jeweled bracelet. This seems ludicrous to Abel until he magnifies his vision and realizes the mechanism it contains. “I still have the power to kill Noemi Vidal.”
“No,” Noemi gasps—not in horror, but in pain. “Not anymore.”
He turns to see her standing 1.4 meters behind him, clutching her blood-streaked arm. At her feet lies the ragged bit of metal she used to slice into her own flesh; in her fingers is a pea-sized ampule, ringed in almost microscopic machinery, gleaming wetly. The self-control required to keep from crying out during such pain—it is no less bravery than he’d expect from Noemi but it astonishes him regardless. They’re each bleeding from their left arm, each wounded in almost exactly the same place.
These wounds are the price of their freedom from Mansfield, forever.
Gillian’s face goes pale, and she lets her arm drop. She acknowledges neither the threat she made nor Noemi’s liberating herself from it. “You have to do this,” Gillian insists. “If you didn’t, why would you even be here? You can’t have done it only for the girl. Not this. You crossed an entire galaxy, knowing that your life would be forfeit when you were found! You would never have searched for the Osiris and Haven, not if you didn’t understand your destiny. Only Directive One could make you do that.”
“I believed so, too,” Abel says, “until just now. Yes, I came here for more than Noemi. I had to know what had happened to Father. I couldn’t go on without knowing. Naturally I assumed Directive One helped to lead me here. But that was an incorrect assumption.”
Abel isn’t used to learning new truths without evidence; he can’t even say when this truth first became clear to him.
