Distantly she hears the metal framework give way, clattering against the sides of the gash in the ship until it smashes into the wreckage. Another ninety seconds, she thinks, and we’d have been smashed with it.
Once they can breathe again, she and Abel take stock. “Wait, what is this?” she pants. They’re surrounded by solid metal, with no doors to speak of. “Some kind of storage tank?”
“Possibly.” He remains on his back a few moments longer than her. “As there is no direct means of leaving this spot, we’ll need to devise an escape once—once we’re capable of it.”
Right now, they aren’t. Noemi scraped the side of her face badly in their rough landing, and one jagged bit of metal sliced a small cut at her temple. The self-inflicted wound in her arm is bleeding more now than it was before, too, but she’s less worried about herself than she is about Abel. He manages to use a bit of torn upholstery to bind up his bent ankle with his good hand, but he winces every time he tries to move the other wrist.
“That joint has been compromised more seriously than my ankle,” he reports so calmly he might as well be talking about someone else. “Self-repair would be easier if I hadn’t extracted the auxiliary power module in order to speak to Mansfield. Just because I hadn’t called on it in thirty years, I thought I never would. I believe this is close to what humans call ‘hubris.’”
Noemi doesn’t have any tools that would allow her to repair him, even if she knew how. “This is bad.”
“The damaged components are organic. Even without the power module, I can repair myself within a few hours if I go into a regenerative state.”
She nods. “By then it’s going to be very late at night, but still dark, right? We can get out of here without anybody seeing us.”
“We’ll make a plan once we can assess our situation more fully,” Abel says. He’s talking to himself as much as to her, she suspects. “For now, we should rest.”
“Is a regenerative state like sleep?” Noemi doesn’t much like the idea of spending hours in this icy tank without anybody to talk to, but if that’s what Abel needs, she’ll deal. Maybe she can fall asleep, too. Dozing off somewhere so cold and uncomfortable would be impossible, normally, but at the moment she’s so exhausted it seems possible.
“It will be. But the transition takes several minutes.”
Abel tries to get comfortable, though there have to be few places in the galaxy less comfortable than a debris-filled, ice-cold metal tank. Noemi lets him choose a spot where he can lie on his side, then spoons behind his back, wrapping one arm around him while the other serves as her pillow. When she touches him, he goes very still.
“You need to stay warm,” she says. “If it weren’t for this parka, I’d have frozen down here already.”
“Even with the parka, you would die of exposure within forty hours. I would go into a dormant state not long thereafter and would require a full reboot to awaken.”
“Well, we’re not going to be down here that long.”
Either they’ll be out of trouble by then, or they’ll be dead.
Abel’s quiet for several seconds, and she thinks the regenerative cycle must have begun until he breaks the silence. “Aren’t you going to tell me how badly I’m comforting you?”
“…You didn’t seem to enjoy it, before.”
“Humans are better at defusing tension through humor.”
“Whaaat?” She drags out the word; if Abel wants to be teased, she’ll oblige. “The greatest mech of all mechs just admitted humans are better at something?”
“For now. I might figure it out eventually.”
“Yeah. You might.” Noemi hugs him, rests her forehead against the place between his shoulder blades. He’s not as warm as a human would be, but she hopes she has enough body heat for them both.
They might’ve lost each other. So many things between her and Abel are unsaid—so many she’s unsure of.
But Noemi knows at least one thing she wants to say to him, and she doesn’t intend to waste any more time. “Listen. About before—what I said when we were discussing Simon, and Inheritors—I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
“I don’t know if ‘hurt’ is the right word,” Abel says. But after another moment he adds, “It will do.”
“You’re not ‘lesser’ than me or any other human. I told you once that you were more human than your creator, remember?”
“That proved not to be a very high bar to clear.”
She closes her eyes, concentrating to find the right words. “I don’t pity you for being a mech.”
“But you do pity me.”
If they were in any other situation, Noemi would walk away now. She’d give him time to consider; she’d think up smarter, better things to say. This would all be so much easier. Yet this is the hour they have. “I pitied you for being so alone. That’s all.”
“If other Inheritors come into being, I wouldn’t be alone. But you said their creation would be a sin.”
“Think about it, Abel. Those Inheritors—they’d be hunted across the galaxy. Mansfield never intended to reserve these just for himself or his family, and Gillian Shearer—she thinks her role in this universe is to destroy death itself. Every human who’s afraid of mortality, which means every human ever, would try to capture one. The Inheritors would spend their whole lives on the run. On your own, you can hide, but a whole race of mechs like you? The word’s going to get out. After that, you’d all be hunted down every second of your lives.”
“…That’s your objection?”
“You don’t think it would happen?”
“No. You’re right, it would, if safeguards weren’t in place. But”—Abel’s hand closes around hers—“humans can be killed. They can fall prey to disease, or accident, or even murder. That doesn’t mean they stop having children.”
Is he thinking of them as children already? That feels
