The same way you rationalize setting off a bomb in the middle of a music festival, she thinks. You stop thinking of other people as human.
It’s a couple of hours more before Fouda releases Abel from duty. Noemi could time it to the minute, because she knows Abel has come to her as fast as he could. “You’re feeling well?” He reaches for her face, then hesitates; she finds herself wishing he’d come those few inches closer, so they’d have touched.
“I’m fine. I mean, I’m exhausted and I’m hungry and I’d give my left arm to take a shower, but I’m not sick.”
He doesn’t look as relieved as she thought he would. Instead he glances around the sick bay, assessing each patient in turn. “You should be sick.”
“Huh?”
“On landing approach to Haven, I measured high levels of toxicity in the air. They were incompatible with human life—really, with any life we know of. At first I thought it might be unique to that location, but my more recent scans suggest a far broader distribution. It’s possible the entire planet is toxic to human life.”
“But the trees—and there must be animals—”
“They would’ve evolved to survive in these conditions,” Abel says. “Humans have not.”
None of this makes any sense to Noemi. “But they set up this huge expedition here! The richest and most powerful people in the galaxy—they went to all the trouble of building a Winter Castle here and stocking it with servant mechs. There’s no way they would’ve done that if they knew this planet was sick, and there’s no way they didn’t scan this world top to bottom before any of this began. The Osiris would never have been built in the first place.”
Abel takes Noemi’s wrist in his hand, his thumb above the blue lines of her veins. “Your pulse is normal. You appear to be breathing easily—”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
“You can’t be,” he says flatly. “Before, I thought the ship’s air filtration systems must be operating at enough efficiency to keep the humans on board alive. Obviously that isn’t true. Every person on this ship will fall ill and die unless they’re removed in time.”
“If I were going to be sick, I would know by now. Riko started feeling bad more than a day ago.”
He frowns. “The passengers haven’t asked for help. Nor did Gillian show any signs of illness when Fa—when we spoke to her last.”
Is Delphine Ondimba sick like this right now? She’s the one passenger Noemi liked, the only one worth worrying about. “It might only have been setting in. There’s no way almost everybody in Remedy would come down with this while every single passenger on the Osiris would stay well.”
Abel ventures, “Possibly the better health care the passengers would’ve received explains it. They’ve always eaten better food, had opportunities for optimized exercise without being subjected to hard labor—much as you grew up in a far healthier environment on Genesis.”
Briefly Noemi recalls Ephraim Dunaway explaining that he knew she was “too healthy” to be from anywhere but Genesis. If only they had a doctor like Ephraim here. “It’s not just me, though. Did you notice that Captain Fouda’s fine, too? So are a handful of the other Remedy fighters.”
“It’s mysterious,” Abel admits. She knows he hates confessing he doesn’t know something nearly as much as a cat hates getting wet. It would be funny if the situation weren’t so desperate. “Still, I’d like to further analyze the possibility that preexisting health makes a difference. Remember how your physical condition helped you when you had Cobweb.”
Cobweb. Noemi feels the white lines on her shoulder prickle, and thinks of the scars along the side of Fouda’s face. “Oh, my God.”
“What?” Abel takes hold of her shoulders. “Are you dizzy? Nauseated?”
“I’m one hundred percent okay,” she says. “And I think maybe I know the reason why.”
Reaching the ship’s real sick bay takes some effort. It’s not that far away, but the doors don’t reach all the way to the old ceiling, now the floor, so Abel has to jump for it and help Noemi over. Then the consoles and biobeds are suspended so far overhead that she wonders why they bothered coming here when the equipment is out of reach.
But Abel rigs up an emergency platform and is able to work on the consoles just as efficiently when they’re upside down. Noemi remains at the base of the platform to steady it while he works. Her head is at the level of his calf. Greenish light from the screen illuminates his face as he says, “The database has files about Cobweb, but they’re all locked. Only Burton Mansfield and Gillian Shearer are cleared to access them.”
Good luck getting Gillian to help them out. Noemi groans and leans her head against Abel’s leg. “So much for that.”
“Actually, I suspect they’re locked only to a basic DNA scan. If so, we’re in luck.” Abel holds his hand up to a soft-scanner that reads tissue. In the dim green glow, Noemi can see dark matter crusted under his nails—his own blood. She’ll never forget watching Abel literally tear his own body apart only to see his unworthy creator one more time.
The scanner blinks and whirs, and data begins to rapidly unfurl on the screen. She can’t read it at this distance, at least not upside down, but she begins to smile. “You got through, didn’t you?”
“As far as this ship knows, I am Mansfield.” He pulls back in surprise.
“What? What is it?”
Slowly Abel says, “They’ve all had Cobweb.”
“Huh?”
“Every registered passenger aboard this ship was infected with a weakened form of the Cobweb virus before departure. This was done under clinical supervision, with antiviral treatment being administered almost immediately. Under such conditions, Cobweb would virtually never be fatal.”
Everything begins clicking together. “We knew Cobweb was man-made,” Noemi says. “We knew they made it for some purpose, but we couldn’t guess what it was.”
“We still lack proof,” Abel says, “but I believe we both share the
