by C. Gockel
The first cannon had taken out the cruiser, but behind it was the second. Noa aimed the Ark for a rocky mass beneath the pass and called the remaining ticks and freighters to cover the onslaught that would be coming from the rear. She saw the first cruiser above sparking from the first cannon. She'd aimed the second at a spot above the cluster where another cruiser had been appearing earlier, but couldn't see if she'd hit her mark.
“Three minutes and forty seconds,” said the calm male voice. The hull reverberated with the force of a charge—but it was obvious the Luddecceans were more worried about the gate and Fleet reinforcements. The Guard wasn't going to worry about the Ark—not yet.
“Three minutes and thirty seconds.”
Noa exhaled. By the time they caught her game, it would be too late.
“Three minutes and twenty seconds.”
She took a deep breath and felt a barely perceivable bite in her lungs. A tiny part of her remembered that she'd forgotten the treatment for her cryssallis infection. Another unwelcome specter that had haunted her. She shifted her grip on the steering bars and felt the absence of the fingers on her left hand acutely. She was ready for it to be over.
“Three minutes and ten seconds.”
Noa dipped her chin. Through the skylight, she saw the planetoid that was her destination looming closer, the first heavy cruiser blocking the pass trapping the second behind it. A few fighters flew around the cruiser and began firing on the Ark. Noa smiled wickedly, even as the ship's voice said, “Life support lost on decks 22, 23, and 24. Hull breach on deck 10.” The old boat had been made to withstand asteroid impacts … bludgeoned and battered, she didn't veer from her course.
“Three minutes.”
Noa's smile widened. And then from the floor came a tiny cheep. Her smile dropped and she looked down and saw Carl Sagan dancing in a circle on the floor. “You're supposed to be with Raif,” she said.
“Two minutes and fifty seconds.”
Carl Sagan jumped up onto the console, resumed his frantic dance, and chirped fearfully.
“I'm blowing this thing up,” she said to the werfle. She wouldn't forsake her mission.
Carl Sagan clutched his upper most paws to his chest. “Sorry, buddy,” Noa said. “I know you didn't sign up for this.”
She looked out at the planetoid looming ever closer, and for the first time, her heart hurt.
The ship's voice intoned, “Two minutes and forty seconds.”
James was lying stomach first on the floor, head to one side. His mind was sharp and clear—his body strangely limp. There were shackles on his hands and on his ankles. From conversation in the sterile, narrow airlock he was held in, he realized that the ship had jumped to lightspeed … the Ark's time bands were disabled; Noa could never reach him.
In his mind, a gate buzzed, “One of the Guard's heavy cruisers has been disabled with cannon fire.”
Another gate said, “A second is potentially out of commission from a secondary blast. Not yet confirmed.”
Two blasts. Noa had none left.
“Ether-controlled ticks and a Daewoo Class 9 Tramp have been dispatched to defend the gate.”
James's eyes blinked and dust on his irises scratched the underside of his eyelids. He stifled a hiss of pain.
“The Ark is on a collision course with a planetoid near the first heavy cruiser emerging through the pass,” said one of the gates.
“No,” said James, aloud and to the voices in his head.
“Did it just speak?” said a voice attached to a set of boots.
“Yes, it is on a collision course,” Eight said, sounding slightly vexed. “Your denial is not logical, Archangel. Perhaps it is a symptom of your damage?”
James gasped and closed his eyes. Noa would die. The Ark hadn't been designed with escape pods. They were useless wastes of space to crews of the ancient colony ships. Their destinations were so remote, the chance of finding a habitable planet even rarer than the chance of rescue.
“The Heretic has activated the Ark's self-destruct,” said One, sounding oddly cheerful. “The blast should cause the small planetoid next to the pass through the cluster to destruct and buy time for the Fleet reinforcements to arrive.”
“The second cannon blast did not fully disable its target. It is in firing range of the Kanakah Gate,” said another gate.
“The Ark's self-destruct has engaged!” One cried, and there was no mistaking the joy in his—its—voice.
“All transmission has been lost,” said another gate. “The Kanakah Gate must have been destroyed.”
“It is good that it wasn't awake,” Eight said.
James felt as though the walls were closing in, or a black hole was opening up beneath him, or both. “Why did you let her through?” James demanded.
“He is still following his original programming,” said Eight. “You're hurting him.”
“I sacrificed myself! Why did you let her through?” James cried, struggling against his bonds.
The voices in his head went silent, and then One said, “I don't understand. What do you mean by hurt?”
A boot connected with his jaw and James screamed, because of the pain, because of the injustice of the gates, and because he'd lost Noa, for good.
Noa had lost. Clutching Carl Sagan, she floated in Airlock 1, knees pulled up to her chest. The airlocks hadn't been designed as escape pods. She'd only thought to hide out in it because of a random conversation Jun and Kuin had had after Manuel, Gunny, and Noa had toyed with using the self-destruct on Adam's Station. She'd overheard Jun saying during breakfast a few days later, “If the commander issues a self-destruct order, I'm hiding out in Airlock 1. All the airlocks have their own air recyclers for disease containment and isolation, they're the most robust of all the habitable pre-fab modules these old boats were built from, and Airlock 1 has its own power gen because the colonists had a power outage during landing that lasted—”
“It would be blown up like the rest of the ship!” Kuin had snapped.
“Not if both doors were sealed! It would be blown clear.”
“You're crazy!” Kuin had retorted. “What would we even eat if we did survive?”
“I was thinking of stuffing some rations and a goop jar in the area where the settlers used to keep their gardening tools.”
Kuin had screwed up his face at mention of the “personal waste recycler” that was the “goop jar.” “You really are crazy.”
Noa sighed and looked at the locker where once settlers had kept farming equipment and now had a “goop jar” and a stack of S-rations. “Thank you for being crazy Jun … I think.”
It had been thirty-five hours since she'd set the collision course with the planetoid, and at the last minute, abandoned the ship to its final destination, racing with Carl Sagan to Airlock 1. The ether was silent. Which meant that the Fleet wasn't here and wasn't coming. She'd failed.
Noa took a deep breath and felt a familiar bite in her lungs. She hadn't packed her cryssallis medication in her escape. She stroked Carl Sagan's soft fur. “You didn't sign up for this, either.” She wasn't sure if she'd abandoned ship because of the werfle, or because she was Luddeccean raised Christian and suicide was frowned on, or if maybe seeing Carl Sagan had reminded her that there was one more member of her crew who was unaccounted for. She wasn't sure she'd wrapped her head completely around what James was, or his connection to the time gates. She reached helplessly for him in the ether. “But I don't think they're the enemy, James.” The gates were ubiquitous above major colonies; if they wanted to attack, they would have done so.
She exhaled in the silence. “I know you're not the enemy, James.” Even if there was some grand human-machine conflict on the horizon, at the very end, he'd given himself to save the crew.
James's ethernet silence hurt, so she spoke aloud. “Maybe, Carl Sagan, it's just like how there are good guys on both sides. Even during Six … I met some of the miners. They were just fighting for what they believed were their l
egitimate holdings. They weren't all bad. Weren't like Wren. Were more like Luddies, really. Honest … but stupid.”
She scratched his ears. “I've been talking to myself a lot, haven't I? That's what happens when I don't have an ether connection to someone.”
The werfle gave a squeak that she imagined sounded indignant. She had been imaging a lot in the past three days. Probably because she hadn't slept more than six hours in that time. “Nightmares just come naturally when you're in a floating coffin,” Noa muttered. Her eyes slid around the small space. Caught in an air recycler draft, her grandparents' hologlobe floated by her nose. Plucking it from the air, she switched it on absently.
Her great-something grandmother flickered into view, wearing the kimono made of Nigerian cloth. “My family came for me. They took me back to the colony, forbidding me to marry outside my ethnicity.”
Her great-something grandfather Sato put his hand on hers. “But I went to go get her.”
The holo flickered, and went out, and Noa was once more alone with her thoughts, feeling as though the walls were closing in. “We're never taking a ride in a coffin like this again, Carl Sagan,” she muttered.
The gate was destroyed. There would be no Fleet to rescue Luddeccea … and she wouldn't be able to rescue James. She swallowed. No matter what he was—how augmented, or cybernetic—he said he was afraid. “He's more alone than I am,” Noa said and her mind reached helplessly by habit to his channel. She'd done the same when Tim died.
Noa's body began to float to her right and what had once been the inner door of the airlock. Snatching the hologlobe and jamming it into her pocket, she whispered, “Is that gravity, Carl Sagan?”
The werfle didn't answer, just squirmed out of her grasp to take a position on her shoulder. As the gravity slowly increased, Noa used her hands to catch the walls and bring herself around so she was standing on the wall beside the door. There was a loud thunk, and Noa felt reverberations against her feet. The airlock trembled. An internal app calculated the gravity as 1.620 meters per second—about the same as Sol's moon.
“Solar cores,” Noa mumbled. “We're being boarded by Luddies and I don't have a weapon.” They'd apparently decided to stick around and clean up and had found her metal tin—if it was anyone else, they would be contacting her through the ether channels.
Carl Sagan squeaked and she swore again he sounded insulted. Noa patted his head. “Except you, of course.”
She looked at the other door. She could open it, suck whoever was trying to board out into the void along with her.
She heard a shearing noise, and the door to the airlock began to squeal open.
Her grandfather's words rang in her mind. “... I went to go get her.” Noa's hands balled into fists. No, she wouldn't go out like that.
“Well,” she said to Carl Sagan. “They're Luddies. Maybe they will take us to James … if they don't toss us out an airlock.” She swallowed. There were things much worse than being tossed out an airlock.
Chapter Eighteen
“You shouldn't experiment on him like this,” Eight said to One. “It … hurts … him.”
“He can leave anytime,” One replied. “And it is the humans that are experimenting on him.”
“I want to leave,” James said aloud and into the … whatever it was he used to communicate with the gates. His voice was barely audible above a whirring noise at his sides. A scream, muffled and distorted by his unresponsive jaw, tore through James as needles slipped beneath his fingernails. His head jerked up. The needles withdrew. His head banged against the table and the voices of the gates were silent. The only sound he heard was his own panting. He was strapped to a table in a room that was too cold. Shackles on his wrists kept him from moving—he'd been informed that they siphoned power out of his limbs. A bright white light shone above his eyes, leaving him virtually blind. His mind was filled with darker thoughts. There was no hope for escape … even if he could upload himself, he'd still be a pawn to the gates, and Noa would still be dead. He still would have failed.
“Interesting,” someone said. “It appears exactly as though he feels pain.”
Kenji's voice came from far off. “It does not feel pain, Dr. Lopez. It is programmed to look like it feels pain.”
His skin burned at the pronoun “it” and the dark little app in his mind that had tried to warn him about his nature flared to life. James wanted to laugh darkly; instead, he just gasped. “I really wish I could convince my body that it didn't feel pain.”
He heard a whir. The needles were promptly reinserted beneath his nails.
When the needles were removed and he was done screaming, another, gruffer voice said, “You think you're funny?”
James panted and swallowed. “Sometimes,” he muttered, and his circuits didn't reboot so much as flicker. But even the flicker was better than the darkness. He heard a whir—the machine, whatever it was, that pushed the needles. His mouth seemed to have been disconnected from his good sense because he added, “Other times … not so much.”
“Does it display other emotions?” Kenji asked, and James's hands made fists and he felt his tattoos unfurling on his skin. Everything about Noa's little brother set James on edge. He'd sent Noa to a re-education camp, brought the Guard to the Kanakah Cloud, ultimately was responsible for her death, and James's current circumstance.
“Halt it, Virk,” said Dr. Lopez, and James released a breath when the whirring pain delivery system went silent.
“Oh, yes!” said Lopez. “It's really quite extraordinary.”
James's heart—or the part of him that he'd begun to think of as a cybernetic metronome—began to speed up. The light above James's eyes switched off. He closed his eyes immediately, dreading what was coming next.
Virk tsked and James felt his fingers on his eyelids. He slid his eyes, looked to the side, and Virk shone a light so bright at them that James wanted to wince in pain. His forehead crumpled but his jaw only shifted. He looked up at the ceiling. There was a screen like an old-fashioned computer there. The cybernetic metronome ticked faster.
A hand waved above his face. “He appears to have a problem with his lower jaw region. Although he can speak and eat perfectly well, he is not able to display emotions with that region of his face,” Dr. Lopez said. “It has made testing for more subtle emotions difficult.”
“It doesn't feel emotions,” Kenji said. By his intonation, James knew his face would be nearly expressionless.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Dr. Lopez amended. “Of course you're right. He seems to have a glitch with his ability to express emotions in that region.”
James's jaw shifted. He wanted to make Kenji hurt. “Some humans have the same sort of defect,” James said. If Kenji caught the barb, he made no indication. James's eyes narrowed.
“Let's turn on the playback.”
James closed his eyes, only to have them abruptly yanked open by Virk's large fingers. A picture of Noa was on the screen. She was healthy, smiling, vibrant. He lifted his head involuntarily.
“You'll notice his pupils enlarge—like a man in love. His target must have noticed these small physical cues … oh, also interestingly, he has a scent … a synthetic manufactured smell that correlates to a genetic makeup that would be diametrically opposite of his target's.”
Did his pupils widen? Inwardly, he was shuddering. Noa was the destination, the one person, the one thing that mattered. And she'd died. He'd failed.
A voice James hadn't heard yet, asked, “What is the significance of him having a different scent than Sato?”
“Women are more sensitive to scent than men,” Dr. Lopez answered. “They are more attracted to men whose scent is very different—it keeps the gene pool healthy. That, and his appearance, so close to her dead husband's, would make the more feeble mind of a woman very susceptible to him.”
James remembered how his appearance had done just the opposite—had actually made him repulsive to Noa. He heard Lopez and the second man pace, b
ut Kenji was very quiet.
“Why did the entities aboard the gates go to all this trouble?” said the voice he didn't recognize. “And what was their ultimate aim?”
James hated everyone in the room—but Kenji most of all—and the image of Noa above him hurt more than any physical pain. “My programming was to protect Noa Sato,” he said. “But you killed her, didn't you, Kenji?”
He heard a sharp intake of breath, and hurried footsteps before the whir of the torture device began again. He screamed until his vision tunneled with hunger and then went black.
Electricity sizzling across his skin woke him.
“Think you could get away from us?” Virk asked, face so close James could smell the dank stench of his breath.
He envied Noa's ability to die.
As the inner airlock opened, she smelled sweat, and heard a masculine grunt. She began to waver in her belief. Her eyes slid to the other door. If it opened, the force of the vacuum would suck her and the invaders out in seconds—what a way to go kamikaze—the original Japanese translated into divine wind. How appropriate.
And then from the crack of the inner airlock door at her feet she heard a werfle squeak. It wasn't from Carl Sagan though. She blinked.
There was a rush of air thick with the scent of unwashed human, and the doorway opened with a groan. Noa found herself staring down at a man in rough garb, or more accurately, she found herself staring into the eyes of a sleek black werfle wrapped around his neck. Carl Sagan gave a happy cheep, and the werfle responded in kind. Noa's eyes swept past the man—he was in the interior of a vehicle that was probably a tick. She heard a woman say, “Jake … ya find another werfle?”
A woman's voice didn't put Noa at ease. A woman could be more sadistic than a man, in her experience. But the werfle, that did make her relax, though maybe it shouldn't.
The man looked away from Noa. “Yee-app, and a human, too. A throwback by the looks of her.”
“What color?”
“She's real dark, Suzi.”