Defy the Worlds (Defy the Stars #2)(70)

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 same theory.”

Whatever Earth scientists were trying to do, they screwed up. If it’s a weapon, it escaped into their own population before they were able to use it against yours, said Ephraim Dunaway months ago on Stronghold, when he explained what little Remedy knew about the Cobweb virus at that time. If word got out that this disease was created by Earth, we’d have mass rioting on every world of the Loop.

“Cobweb wasn’t designed to hurt people,” she says. “It must’ve been designed to save them.”

Abel nods. “Haven must have been found several decades ago. Earth’s government would’ve realized it would be the perfect replacement for Genesis, if only for the few environmental factors that kept it from being safe for human beings. So they attempted to bioengineer a virus that would rewrite human DNA, only enough for them to endure the conditions here. In that regard, Cobweb does exactly what its creators hoped. But the virus is more dangerous to human life than they knew.”

“A lot of people who catch Cobweb get so sick they die.” Noemi shakes her head in wonder. “But the ones who survive… they inherit an entire world.”

“I put the probability of this hypothesis being correct at approximately 92.6 percent.” Abel hops down from the platform to her side, so lightly and easily that she’s reminded again—he’s not quite human. “There are medicines for Cobweb in storage on the ship, including weaker forms of the virus that might operate as inoculations—”

“Thank God,” Noemi says. She has serious problems with Remedy’s radical wing, but she can’t bear to watch people needlessly suffer and die. “We can help them.”

But Abel shakes his head. “The materials aren’t stored in the sick bay. They were considered ‘high risk’ and are kept in the same area as the tanks for growing mechs. That’s territory currently held by the passengers.”

That was the first place they’d run to, when Noemi told them they needed to control “valuable resources” on the ship. I believed Gillian was being so selfish, leading us there, Noemi thinks. But she knew exactly what she was doing. She was the ruthless soldier at war. I was the one in over my head.

“If Earth made Cobweb a virus,” she says slowly, “one that spread organically, with a high level of contagion, so absolutely everyone would catch it—they didn’t originally intend to hide Haven. They meant to share it with the galaxy.”

Abel considers this, then nods. “That also seems likely. Earth’s government still chose to conceal Haven in the end, but it seems likely they did so primarily to cover up the truth about Cobweb.”

“That’s not a good enough reason. Not to deny this to humanity—to resume the Liberty War—” Noemi gasps. “That’s why they did it, isn’t it? Why they came back decades after we thought they’d let us go? They ended the war when Haven was found. They started it again when they realized they could never reveal the truth about this planet.”

“I can only put that at a 71.8 percent probability,” Abel says gravely.

“You mean—probably. Not certainly, but probably.”

He nods.

Noemi feels nauseated, not from illness but from the knowledge that her world could’ve been saved so easily—but someone, somewhere, decided they had too much to hide.



She expects returning to the makeshift sick bay to be more difficult, now that she knows these people could so easily have been treated. They’ll have to break this news to Fouda, who will of course want to attack the passengers immediately—a conflict Noemi doesn’t want any part of any longer. Even less does she want to be surrounded by suffering people she can’t save; after Genesis and now this, she feels like some mythological bringer of death.

But the worst part of her return is when she sees how much worse Riko is.

“Riko?” She hurries to Riko’s bedside, Abel beside her. Riko looks so ragged, so miserable, that Noemi can hardly connect her to the energetic, sarong-clad woman they met on Kismet’s moon. Even when Riko was in prison on Earth, her strength shone through. Now she looks like her own ghost. “Hang on, okay? We might be able to help you.”