“Yes, I have a message.” Akide has a strange expression on his face. “Do what you were made for.”
He straightens to his full height and withdraws a small device from his robe, larger than a comm link but smaller than a spanner. Before Abel can ask what it is, Akide hits a switch and—
The floor tilts and sways. Visual input shuts down entirely; touch and smell go to minimum. Abel staggers sideways and would fall except that Professor Akide catches him in his arms. Only sound remains to him, that and the panic of his own thoughts.
Akide helped design me, Abel thinks in a daze. He knows how to shut me down.
Whatever signal was sent doesn’t render Abel completely unconscious, the way Mansfield’s old fail-safe did; he retains some mental function and full auditory input. “Why?” he manages to say. If he’s judging the sounds correctly, Akide is dragging him along the Persephone corridor. “What are you—”
“I’m sorry, Abel. I’m genuinely sorry about this. But I have to secure you.” Professor Akide’s footsteps stagger in irregular thumps; Abel’s considerable weight is no doubt difficult for the older man to manage. “Make sure your consciousness is bound good and tight. Then I can take you back to the one cybernetics lab we have on Genesis. There, I can get some work done.”
“What—do you—”
“This battle doesn’t change anything.” Akide sounds resigned, as fatalistic as Noemi described him. “Our victory today will only make Earth more desperate. They’ll send human troops next, and they’ll land on Genesis. They’ll kill our children, burn our homes. We can’t let that happen.”
“But—Haven—”
“There’s no guarantee Earth’s people will accept Haven as a new home for humanity. They have to survive a life-threatening disease to even think about it! Even if they do, every person on every single colony world is going to feel betrayed by Earth. Haven can’t be their home for a long time to come, if ever. So to avoid a mass uprising, Earth must conquer Genesis, immediately. The battle today proved that. That means this is our last chance to stop them.” Akide takes a deep breath. “Long ago I learned to question the work I did with Burton Mansfield. I thought I’d left it behind me. Now I see God’s true purpose in it. He led me to Mansfield, because Mansfield would lead me to you.”
They want to destroy the Genesis Gate. The only way to do that is to send Abel through in a ship with a thermomagnetic device—Noemi’s original plan, all those months ago. In the resulting detonation, Abel would be utterly destroyed, possibly vaporized.
And Akide has the programming knowledge to force Abel to do it.
Noemi wouldn’t allow Abel to choose the path of destroying himself to destroy the Gate. Instead it seems that destruction has chosen him.
35
THERE’S NOTHING WORSE THAN BEING AT THE HEART OF A battle you’re unable to fight.
Noemi decides this about the fourth time a mech flies straight into what would’ve been her crosshairs. Her thumbs tighten on the controls, instinctively seeking triggers for weapons that aren’t there. In the corsair, it accomplishes exactly zero, except for accidentally turning on Virginia’s music.
Once she’s shut that off, she tries to take stock. Without the combat map provided by command, or any communications with her fellow fighters, making sense of the battle is almost impossible. Genesis starfighters dart among Vagabond ships of every size and stripe. Mechs fly around her, random as gnats, sometimes so thick they blind her to the rest of the starfield. She’s still registering as a civilian vessel to them, so she’s safe, but Noemi didn’t come here to stay safe. She came here to help.
Even without weapons, she can defend her world.
Months ago, she was on the verge of being captured by Stronghold authorities when Virginia flew by in this exact ship. Virginia had defended the Persephone not with blasters or lasers, but by scrambling the signals all around her.
Why didn’t I ask her exactly how she did that? Noemi thinks as she goes through the various controls, familiarizing herself more with the corsair’s less-critical functions. That would’ve been an extremely useful conversation to have. Mega-useful. Finally she hits upon a subroutine in communications that ought to work. Here goes nothing….
The corsair broadcasts on wavelengths that rise and fall in sine curves across the control panel. At first she wonders whether she’s now playing Virginia’s music to the mechs, which would be hostile but not effective. Then she sees a handful of mechs fold their strange metallic wings, almost like bats preparing to sleep. A smile spreads across her face as she realizes they’ve lost their command signals from the Damocles.
That’s exactly what they’re doing, Noemi thinks. They’re falling asleep!
Laughing out loud, she pushes farther into the thick of the night and does it again. Once more, a dozen mechs fold up into uselessness, and the Genesis and Vagabond ships pick them off one by one. This isn’t as satisfying as destroying them herself, Noemi decides, but it’s effective. The more Queens and Charlies she incapacitates, the better chance Genesis’s forces have of winning this fight.
When she swoops into another cloud of mechs, they adjust formation. Noemi’s heart sinks as she realizes the Damocles ship has detected what she’s doing. So has the Katara; the massive vessel changes course, trying to put itself between the corsair and the Damocles, but it’s too late. Any second now, those mechs are going to attack her—
—yet in one instant that formation breaks, and the mechs turn on one another.
“What the
