Defy the Worlds (Defy the Stars #2)(90)

Her tongue sticks out of the corner of her mouth as she works. “All right, now what?”

“Now we send out a relay code,” Noemi says. “One that should signal all of Remedy to listen to our message, and join forces.”

“Oh, we’re going to call the terrorists!” Virginia’s smile is stiff, deliberately fake. “What jolly good fun.”

“Not everyone in Remedy is a terrorist. Even some of the ones who are—” Noemi remembers Riko lying on the floor of the Osiris, wondering what she’d been fighting, and what she’d been fighting for. Those aren’t questions you want to leave unanswered to the end. “—They’ve had it hard. And if they save Genesis, I think that makes up for a lot.”

Virginia doesn’t look convinced, but she turns the console over to Abel, who memorized the relay code. He begins inputting it, saying, “After the relay codes, I’ll send a second message to Ephraim. He’s the one member of Remedy we’ll all agree on trusting.”

It jolts Noemi to realize that she’ll actually get to see Ephraim Dunaway again. Every aspect of her freedom on this side of the Genesis Gate strikes her anew, now that she has the time to consider it. There are so many people I want to talk to. So many places I want to go.

But Genesis has to come first.

Within minutes, a return message chimes. Noemi wants to cheer. “Remedy?”

“Sort of,” Abel says, putting the signal through to the main screen. There, larger than life, are Ephraim, Harriet, and Zayan, all together on the bridge of what looks to be a small ship, each one of them smiling.

“You found her!” Harriet cries, waving. “Hullo, Noemi!”

“Hi.” Noemi barely gets the word out; her throat tightens from the sheer joy of seeing these lost friends once more. Traveling to the rest of the galaxy as a free person rather than as a prisoner—it’s the greatest exhilaration she knows. It’s no wonder she had so much trouble forgetting and moving on. Who would ever want to forget a universe so much bigger, bolder, and richer with possibility?

Ephraim says, “Glad you’re all right, Genesis girl. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to get any relay codes—”

“We obtained them ourselves.” Abel sounds pleased with himself, but the glance he gives Noemi makes it clear he’s proud of her, too. “We’ve sent them out. Hopefully, Remedy ships will soon respond.”

The three people on the screen look at one another with mingled amazement and amusement. “That’s all well and good,” Zayan says, “but we dug up a few ships of our own.”

Noemi frowns. “What do you mean?”

“We called for the Vagabonds, and they came. They’ve brought medical personnel and drugs and—well, and themselves.” Harriet holds out her hand as she steps away, allowing the Persephone to see what’s on their ship’s screen. An entire flotilla of vessels hovers in space around them—no, an entire fleet. Are those dozens of ships, or more than a hundred?

Slowly, Noemi rises to her feet. “They came,” she murmurs. “You told them what Earth did to Genesis, and the Vagabonds rose up.”

Ephraim nods with satisfaction. “The chain reaction has just begun.”





30



THE VAGABOND FLEET HAS ASSEMBLED NEAR THE planetoid Pluto, a location of which Abel approves. It has several advantages: isolation, relative inattention from Earth, and at this point in Pluto’s orbit, not too great a distance from the Genesis Gate. It is an ideal place to hide, an even better place from which to strike.

Although he’d been able to extrapolate the size of the fleet from the image shown before, the impact of the assembled ships is far greater in person. More than a hundred Vagabond craft cruise in loose formations, all of them brilliantly, individually decorated by the people who work and live within. A quick scan reveals an ore hauler with Celtic knots in vivid green; another, smaller one with Sioux patterns in black, beige, red, and turquoise; and one tiny cruiser painted to look like a turtle. While many of the ships are small, not even as large as the Persephone, others reach impressive sizes; Abel even spots a few freighters, modified with extensive armaments.

Noemi notices the weapons, too. “That’s some pretty heavy firepower,” she says from her place beside him on the bridge. “Those modifications show some wear. They didn’t do this just to help Genesis.”

“Hardly.” Abel is aware his voice has taken on the tone humans call dry. “While most Vagabonds perform honest work, there are bands of self-described privateers. They get vague licenses from marginal authorities on colony worlds that purportedly allow them to search other ships and ‘reclaim’ any unauthorized cargo.”

Her eyes get big. “Wait—you mean they’re pirates?”

“Some would call them that. Others would call them heroic for their defiance of Earth’s supremacy.”

“What would you call them?” Noemi asks.

“That depends on the ship in question. These vessels appear to be from the Krall Consortium, the largest of the organized ‘free trading’ groups—known for rampant thievery, but also for avoiding loss of life.”

“Thieves but not murderers.” She looks toward the ceiling, maybe to God. “I guess right now we have to take what allies we can get.”