The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance

The Noah C. L. Wilson

“Why do we bother?”

Eve Cartwright looked up from the soil recovery auger she was using to collect core samples for testing. “What did you say?”

The shielded screen on her sister Shar’s biosuit visor reflected the sunlight and surroundings, making it impossible to see her face. “I said, ‘Why do we bother?’ I mean . . . what does it matter? What does any of this matter?” The girl’s hand swept out, indicating the vast wasteland that had once been a celebrated old-growth forest on one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet. But that had been hundreds of years ago, before the End, the cataclysmic war that had poisoned the world and left it a barren, contaminated husk.

“It matters because this is our world. The only one we have. And even if we never walk its surface without a biosuit, someone who comes after us will. And when they do, they’ll thank us for all our work.”

Eve stood up, wiping the knees of her clay-dust-coated biosuit. She and the girls had been struggling all their lives to save what tiny remnants of their world they could, just as their ancestors had for the last three hundred years. Yes, the task seemed insurmountable. Whether they were searching the wastes for signs of life or sampling air, soil and water to test for regeneration and habitability, most days were long, fruitless, depressing efforts in futility. Like Shar, Eve had had her moments of doubt in the past, but she wasn’t made to give up, no matter how difficult the path might seem.

A bright light flashed in the sky overhead, and a boom rattled the earth, making Eve and Shar grab the nearest boulder as loose rocks shifted and tumbled down the mountainside. Eve glanced up to see what looked like a meteor streaking through the sky – through the very nearby sky.

It disappeared behind a large sand dune in the desert wastes below, then another boom shook the ground. A cloud of dust rose into the air.

“Did you see that?” Shar breathed. She turned around, her eagerness unmistakable. “Let’s go check it out.” She ran toward the solar-powered rover they used to transport themselves, their equipment and their samples on their expeditions.

“Shar . . . Shar! Dang it.” Eve sighed, packed up her samples, and jogged after her sister.

Twenty minutes later, the rover crested the last dune near the spot where the object had fallen from the sky. Inside the spacious helmet of her biosuit, Eve’s jaw dropped. Down below, half-buried in that sand, was what appeared to be a ship of some kind.

“Is it Alliance, do you think?” Shar asked.

“I doubt it. There’s been no sign of Alliance or Cartel ships in three hundred years. The holovids say they were all wiped, just like the rest of the planet.” For the last three hundred years, the people of Homebase had been the only survivor colony on the planet – well, if you didn’t count the Ghosts, those savage bands who dwelled in the wastes. “If we’re going to check this thing out, we’d better do it quick.

It’s getting dark, and the Ghosts will be out soon.” The ship’s descent and crash had been visible for miles, which meant there was a good possibility the Ghosts had seen it too, and would be coming to investigate. “Bring the rover in close. I don’t want far to go if we need to make a quick getaway.”

“Roger.” Shar maneuvered the rover into the valley between the dunes and drove right up to the crash site.

“That’s close enough,” Eve advised. She hopped out of the rover and approached the ship cautiously.

The soft dune sand had absorbed the impact, leaving the ship intact. Steam vented from several places on the vehicle’s silvery shell. The ship was without any external markings. Not Alliance then, nor Cartel.

Unless of course either of those had stopped painting identifying marks on their warcraft.

Eve circled the vehicle, looking for a way in. The ship seemed too large to be an unmanned drone, and if the pilot had survived the crash, she wasn’t going to leave him without offering assistance.

The more she examined the craft, the more confused she became. The ship was like nothing she’d ever seen before. The silvery shell looked more like layers of crystal than metal, and now the setting sun had cast the bottom of the valley into shadow, what she’d thought was sunlight glinting off the ship’s highly reflective metal surface now resembled pulsating light trapped in some sort of translucent shell.

What was this thing? Where had it come from?

“Stay back, Shar,” she cautioned, waving a hand in a sharp, imperious gesture when her sister’s curiosity got the better of her. “In fact, stay in the rover.” She didn’t think the ship was going to explode.

She couldn’t see any sign of a fuel leak – for that matter, she couldn’t see any sign of an engine! – and based on the readouts from her gas chromatograph the venting was primarily water vapor. She made another circuit of the ship, moving in closer this time. The entire surface of the craft appeared seamless, as if the whole object had been formed from a single molded piece of . . . whatever the ship’s exterior substance was. What in the name of heaven was she looking at?

A loud whooshing noise and the sudden jetting of vapor clouds made Eve jump and Shar scream. Eve spun around to find that the previously solid surface of the ship had pulled back, revealing an opening into the interior of the craft.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Shar called. Her voice sounded tight. Afraid. “Come away, Eve. The sun’s gone down.”

The Ghosts would be out soon, scavenging for food – and sticking around when they were on the prowl was definitely asking for trouble. But this was the first time in three hundred years that any sort of advanced life form had been spotted in the wastes. The first time in three hundred years that anyone in Homebase had had proof they were not the only non-Ghost survivors on the planet. Eve wasn’t about to leave now.

“One more minute.” She detached the disruptor from the belt of her biosuit. No one in Homebase liked weapons – after the End, who would? – but the wastes were dangerous. Too many of Eve’s people had died at the hands of Ghosts while taking samples and conducting experiments in the wastes. Wearing a disruptor when exiting the safety of Homebase was standard operating procedure now. Even Shar knew how to charge and fire a weapon.

“Eve . . . please.”

“Shar, stop. You know I have to check this out.” She worked to stay patient, not to snap. Shar was only twelve, still a child in most of the ways that mattered.

She had reached the craft’s opening. The inside was a pale, luminous blue-white. It was surprisingly tidy, considering the way the craft had crashed to earth. As if the craft’s hull had absorbed most of the shock of the rough landing. A movement to her left made her spin. A figure in a shimmering silver biosuit and helmet was pointing a weapon at her.

Eve was faster on the trigger. The disruptor fired. An energy field enveloped the stranger. The pilot dropped like a stone as the equipment nearby sparked and sputtered.

“Eve!” Shar’s voice crackled through Eve’s in-helmet audio unit. “I just heard wails, and I’m getting movement on the sensors about two kilometers out. The Ghosts are coming. We need to leave.”

“The pilot’s alive but unconscious. Bring the rover to the door and come give me a hand.” She pulled several plastic binding ties from the thigh pockets of her biosuit and used them to bind the pilot’s wrists and ankles. Moments later, Shar was there, and the two of them managed to drag the pilot outside and into the back of the rover.

“So? Is the ship Alliance?” Shar asked, as Eve vaulted back into the passenger seat and the rover took off. They drove by heads-up in-helmet display rather than the rover’s lights. The people of Homebase had long ago learned the folly of using lights at night in the wastes.

“I don’t know. We’ll keep the pilot in quarantine until we find out.” Alliance or no Allliance, she wasn’t going to leave any human being to the mercy of the Ghosts. The wildlings who roamed the wastes were not kind to the humans they found, torturing them in all manner of vile, obscene ways. Ghosts thrived on human agony, probably because it fed a deep-seeded need for vengeance. She couldn’t think of a more horrible way to die. Alliance or not, that wasn’t happening to the craft’s pilot.

The ride home was swift and, thankfully, uneventful. The outer airlock door closed behind the rover and sealed shut. Shar parked the rover on its landing pad and locked it down. Together, she and Eve unloaded their equipment, samples, and the pilot, and stood waiting, arms spread, as decontamination sprays soaked everything in the airlock. When decon was done, they loaded the still-unconscious pilot into a sealed quarantine gurney and placed that alongside all their boxed samples and equipment on a conveyor belt that ran along the left side of the airlock. While the conveyer carried its burdens through an infrared bath and sonic shower, Eve and Shar walked through the secondary airlocks that subjected them to the same treatment. They removed their helmets and biosuits in the third airlock and hung them up for a final decontamination in a heat bath before pulling on loose-fitting tunics and trousers and slipping their feet into shoes.

Everyone was waiting for them when they stepped out of the third airlock into the carefully conditioned atmosphere of Homebase. Everyone, meaning the rest of Eve and Shar’s family: gray-haired Nonna, her younger, but equally gray-haired, sister Dre, and four-year-old Misha, the baby of the family. There had been one other – Eve’s older sister Beri – but she’d been lost to the Ghosts ten years earlier.

Nonna and Dre stared at the bound body inside the sealed gurney with identical looks of concern.

Misha stood on her tiptoes and peered into the glass cover with wide eyes.

“Ghosts were coming,” Eve replied to Nonna and Dre’s unspoken concern. “The ship was unmarked, but I couldn’t very well leave the pilot behind. I’ll take care of it,” she added in response to Dre’s frown.

“I’ll help you,” Nonna offered.

“No.” The pilot had confronted her with a weapon. She wasn’t going to endanger her family any more than she already had. “I’ll do it alone. Our visitor remains locked down in quarantine until we’re sure she’s no threat. You can take care of the samples for me, though. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

Leaving the others to take care of the samples and equipment, Eve pushed the sealed gurney down the corridors to the quarantine lab. Once inside, with the doors sealed and locked behind her, and wearing the protective quarantine lab biosuit to protect herself from potential contamination, she lifted the glass lid on the gurney and activated the hydraulics that lifted the prone figure from the gurney tube to the examination table. The table didn’t come with restraint straps, but Eve improvised with more plastic ties. She dragged the scanner down the length of the pilot’s body, looking for broken bones or internal injuries. Finding none, she set to work removing the pilot’s biosuit.

Beneath the helmet and outer suit was a humanoid. Tall, thin, but well muscled. Lean. Under the silvery cloth of the biosuit, the pilot wore a thin, form-fitting tunic and pants made from some sort of shimmering blue fabric. Eve examined the fabric. The weave was as fine as any she’d ever seen, but its composition didn’t feel like any cloth she’d ever touched. She cut the clothing off the pilot’s body and saved a small square of the interesting material to put in her analyzer. Eve was a woman who liked mysteries for the challenge of solving them.

When she turned back to cut away the pilot’s pants, her breath caught in a little hiccup. She reached a hand out but stopped before touching. She held her hand there, hovering a bare inch from his flesh, trembling faintly. Her head cocked to one side. How odd. Why did the man make her hands shake?

Perhaps because he was the first man she’d ever seen in the flesh? Or because he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, period?

Nothing in the holovids about the world before the End had prepared her for him.

His hair was silky and golden, the color of sunlight shining through clouds. It was cropped close to his skull, except for a slightly longer fringe on top that feathered across his forehead and filled her with the absurd desire to brush it from his eyes. His skin was a pale golden-brown shade, too, much lighter than her own. His face was beautiful. Straight nose, square jaw, well-defined cheekbones, full lips. Eyelashes long, thick, and straight lay against his cheeks. His body was completely hairless, the skin porcelain smooth and so soft to the touch even through the gloves of her biosuit that she could stand there, stroking him, for days without ever losing interest. Baby soft. Possibly softer. She tried to remember what Misha and Shar’s skin had felt like when they were newborns, and couldn’t remember it being like this.

From the waist down, with the exception of the hairlessness, he had all the same parts as the men she’d seen in holovids, but somehow seeing a man up close and personal was very different from the clinical introductions offered in an anatomy lesson.

Eve wet a cloth with cleansing liquid and began stroking the antiseptic, decontamination solution across the pilot’s skin. She washed him more slowly than strictly necessary, letting her fingers explore and linger. She’d never known a man. By the time she’d been born, the men in Homebase were all gone.

He was her first. He was fascinating. She continued the decontamination cleanse down his legs and feet.

Hands, feet, five fingers, five toes. He appeared perfectly human, a living replica of the men she’d seen in the holovids. Except, of course, that he had no navel.

“Who is she?”

Eve jumped a little at the sound of Misha’s voice, then laughed at her own ridiculousness. She’d been so caught up in her discovery, she hadn’t realized her youngest sister had followed her to the quarantine unit. Misha was standing just outside the unit, her small face pressed against the glass wall.

“‘He’, darling. This is a man. You call him ‘he’ not ‘she’.” Eve smiled at the little girl. Familiar love swept over her in a rush. Misha was so adorable, with her big brown eyes, silky, coffee-colored skin, and the black hair Eve had lovingly braided and decorated with shiny crystal beads just this morning. She was only four, and full of curiosity. Her favorite word was “why”, followed closely by “how” and “what”.

“What’s a man?”

“A person, like us, only a different gender. You’ve seen men before, on your training vids.” With Misha there watching, Eve’s strange, almost trancelike fascination with the man had faded. She completed the decon wash of the man’s skin and hosed him down with a spray nozzle. Sudsy water poured off the examination table onto the floor and trickled down the slight slope in the floor to the gravity drain in the center of the room.

“Why is she – he here?”

“I don’t know, darling,” Eve said. “That’s what we’re hoping to find out when he wakes.” She ran the drying tube over the gurney and drew a sheet over the man’s body, tucking it beneath his arms in much the same way as she tucked Misha into bed each night.

“Where did he come from?” Misha did a little dance on the tips of her toes, and ran her fingers on the glass near the man’s hand.

“I don’t know.”

“He’s very pretty. Why is her skin like that?”

“‘His’, dear. His skin. And I imagine that’s what his people look like.”

“You mean there are others like her?”

“Him. And yes, I’m sure there must be.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did he get here?”

That, at least, was one question Eve could answer. “He came in a ship. It crashed in the dunes near Mount Carallon.” She took blood and tissue samples, setting each on the sterilized tray beside her.

“Is he Alliance?”

“Not that I can tell.”

“Why did he come here?”

Eve sighed and then had to laugh. “You already asked me that, darling, and I still don’t know. Until he wakes, I won’t have any answers for you, so why don’t you go help Nonna and Shar with the soil samples?”

Misha’s big brown eyes never strayed from the stranger’s face. “I don’t want to. I want to stay here. Do you think he wants to be friends?”

“I hope so.” He’d pointed what appeared to be a weapon at her when she’d boarded his ship. Now, possibly he’d only been being cautious, not threatening, but Eve was taking no chances. From every holovid she’d ever watched in her life, men were violent at heart. They were the ones who built weapons, who started wars, who murdered, raped and brutalized. She should remember that instead of being so drawn to his alien beauty.

“When will he wake up?”

Eve sighed again and reached for the deep supply of patience one needed when faced with Misha’s curiosity. The child had more questions than the world had answers. “I’m not sure, darling.”

“Well, will he wake up?”

“He should. I’m doing everything I can to make sure it’s possible.” She tracked the scanner over the man’s head again, going more slowly this time and watching the monitor as she did so. There was no sign of a cracked skull or brain swelling, which was amazing considering the force of the crash. Other than a few cuts, scrapes and bruises – and being knocked unconscious – he seemed to have emerged unscathed.

But would he, upon waking, be friend or foe? She hadn’t thought about that when bringing him back to Homebase. Foolish of her, perhaps, but with Ghosts approaching rapidly, getting him to safety had seemed more vital than worrying about what sort of threat he might pose when he awakened.

She finished up with the rest of her scans and samples, and packed up her kit. She exited the quarantine unit and waited in the decontamination airlock for the required three cycles, following protocol even though there was no indication the pilot posed any sort of biological or chemical threat. When the airlock opened, she shed her quarantine biosuit and stepped into the corridor to join Misha. “I’ve got to get these samples to the lab.”

“Can’t I stay here?”

“No, dear.” She ushered a pouting Misha out the door. “Not until we know whether or not it’s safe.”

“But he’s sleeping. I won’t bother him.”

“It’s not you bothering him I’m worried about.” She locked and sealed the quarantine unit doors, activated the motion sensor from the console in the center of the adjoining room, and checked the video feed on her portable comms device to be sure she’d be able to keep an eye on their guest.

The quarantine room was the closest thing to security they had in Homebase. The clear, eight-inch-thick walls were bulletproof, the door locks unbreakable, and the containment system would allow her to flood the room with neural gas, or she could suck all the air out of the room with the touch of a button. If the visitor was a danger to them, she would be able to neutralize him before he had a chance to do any harm.

“Come on, Mimisha. It’s time for lessons.”

The little girl pouted. “I don’t want lessons. I want to stay here.”

“Time for lessons, all the same. You mustn’t neglect your education. He’ll still be here when you come back.”

That seemed to mollify the child. Misha put her plump little hand in Eve’s palm and allowed herself to be led back to the schoolroom. Eve helped the little girl into her learning chair and lowered the teaching helmet over Misha’s head.

“Comfortable?”

The child nodded, and gave “thumbs-up”.

“Good. Enjoy your lessons.” Eve patted the helmet and pushed the button to activate the instructional program. As the tape began and the sound of Misha’s sweet, childish voice began speaking answers to the training questions being posed by her helmet, Eve’s heart swelled with love. Misha was such a beautiful, precious child.

Eve thought about the pilot, about the weapon he’d pointed at her, about the possibility he was from the Alliance or Cartel. She had saved him from the Ghosts. Rescued him despite the weapon he’d pointed in her direction. And she’d brought him here, to Homebase, to mend any wounds he might have sustained.

But if he threatened Misha, Eve would kill him without a second thought.

“So, you’re awake.” Eve put her hands in her lab-coat pockets and regarded the stranger with her head tilted to one side. It had been an hour since she had finished her initial examination. Her tests had all come back negative for any chemical or biological contaminant that might pose a hazard, so she’d left her biosuit hanging in the locker outside the quarantine chamber.

The man’s eyes opened, and Eve received yet another shock to her senses. His eyes were blue, the rich color of deep seas she’d only ever seen in photographs. She already knew that, of course, having checked his pupils for dilation when he was unconscious, but noting the color when he was unconscious had nowhere near the impact of meeting that deep, arresting blue gaze head-on.

Her pulse rate increased, and her breathing grew shallow. Eve moistened her lips. Her palms were sweating. What a strange reaction. She didn’t understand it. He was naked, strapped to an examination table. He posed no threat to her. And yet her pulse still raced, and she could feel the adrenaline coursing through her veins.

“What is your name?” she asked.

The man looked at her blankly, started to sit up, then stopped and glanced down at his restraints.

“You pointed a weapon at me when I boarded your ship. You’ll stay restrained until I find out who you are and what you’re doing here. Do you understand me?”

He frowned at her, regarding her as if she were some sort of odd puzzle he didn’t understand. It occurred to her that he might not understand her language at all, but then he spoke.

“I understand.”

His voice was low and possessed a stirring, musical quality. The sound of it penetrated her skin and vibrated deep in her bones. She shivered, tiny, trembling little quakes that shuddered through her as she stood there. Good heavens. It was all she could do not to press a hand to her thundering heart.

“What is your name?”

The man tugged against his restraints then fixed his gaze upon her. “Release me.”

Eve stood her ground. “Not until you tell me your name.”

“I will not harm you. That is not my purpose.” And his gaze remained so steady, so penetrating upon her, that she could not look away. It was mesmerizing, that look. It made her feel lightheaded and calm all at once. Was it possible for him to control her mind with just his eyes and the sound of his voice? The scientist in her started to scoff at the idea, but thoughts were just energy. Sights and sounds were energy, too . . . just different wavelengths detected by specialized centers in the brain. Audiovisual stimuli had long ago been proven capable of putting the brain in different states.

She forced herself to turn away, and the broken connection let her regather her wits. “You pointed a weapon at me when I boarded your ship. That seemed like a threat of harm to me.”

“You pointed a weapon at me, too. You fired yours.”

“I—” She stopped the apology just before it came blurting out. What did she have to apologize for?

And why in heaven’s name was she blushing? “And I saved your life. The Ghosts were on the way.

Believe me, you wouldn’t want to meet them.”

“Then I thank you for my life and I ask you to release me.”

She ignored the request as if he hadn’t spoken it. “You said you’re here for a purpose. Are you with the Alliance? The Cartel?”

“No.”

“Then who are you with? Are there other factions?”

“I am not of this world. I am the noah of it.”

She crossed her arms. “You’re trying to tell me you’re – what? An alien? A little green man from another planet?” She gave a bark of disbelieving laughter. “Right.”

“I am alien to this planet, yes,” he replied, “but I am neither little nor green.” His expression remained completely deadpan. “I am the watcher of this world. The preserver of its life.”

“Right. Well, if you’re a preserver of this world’s life, you’re a few centuries too late,” she scoffed.

“Most life here was extinguished three hundred years ago.”

“Yes, I remember.”

That got her attention. Her gaze slammed into his as forcefully as if it were hitting a concrete wall. It left her reeling. “You . . . uh . . . you remember? Remember is a word that implies you created a memory engram in your brain of an event that you personally experienced. You mean you remember reading about it?”

“I understand the nuances of your language. I understand the nuances of all languages of this planet. And I did not read about the End. I witnessed it. I told you, I am the watcher of this world. I am its noah.” He nodded to the sink in the corner of the room. “May I have a glass of water?”

Feeling a little dazed, she went to the sink and filled a plastic glass beneath the faucet. When she turned back to the pilot, she screamed and dropped the glass.

The man had somehow freed himself from his restraints and had crossed the room to stand directly behind her – well, now in front of her. In a swift move that left her blinking, he caught the falling glass without spilling a drop. She stumbled back against the sink and gripped the porcelain with both hands as he tilted the glass to his lips and downed the water in four swallows.

“Your restraints cannot hold me, and I choose not to be immobilized.” He reached around her to set the glass on the edge of the sink, then returned to the gurney and sat on its edge, his arms folded across his chest.

He seemed not the least embarrassed by his nudity. Indeed, he seemed unaware of it entirely. But she was not. Eve wondered at the strange fluttering in her belly. She had seen many photographic images and many holovids of men. She had studied the differences in their bodies, their musculature, their voices, their skeletal structure. But she’d never experienced this strange ache in her lower abdomen that made her groin feel heavy and tight.

Stop, Eve! He is a man. You cannot forget that. Men were fascinating creatures, but driven by aggressive, hormone-powered tendencies. The holovids had made that perfectly clear. Men were destructive. It was men who had made the wars and the weapons that had ended life on the planet. Yet here, standing before her, was a man who could clearly overpower her, but who instead exercised restraint and claimed to be a preserver of life. A noah, whatever that was.

“A noah collects archetypal samples of all native organisms from the worlds he watches,” the man said, his intent gaze never leaving her.

“So, what, you’re some sort of alien biologist cataloging all life in the universe?”

“Not exactly. When the time comes, I transplant the organisms I have harvested to a world of the creator’s choosing so that life may begin anew.”

“The creator?”

“The entity you call God.”

“Ah.” Humor the man, Eve. At least he’s talking. And staying on that side of the room. “So you were sent to this world to harvest samples of all life and transport it to a new world?”

“Yes, that was my purpose.” He looked down. He interlaced his fingers and steepled the thumbs. “But I find I can no longer perform the duty for which I was made.” Abruptly, the noah’s belly rumbled and he glanced down at his abdomen in surprise.

“Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?”

“Eat.” He frowned, as if he had to process the information. “Yes, to eat would be good.”

“I’ll bring you something.” She started for the door.

“There is no need to confine me. I am no danger to you.”

“Yes, well, that remains to be seen.” She dialed the lock code on the touchpad and waited for the sound of the seal pressurizing and the lock bars sliding into place. Then she dialed another code to release a mild sedative into the controlled space. “I’ll be back shortly.”

True to her word, she returned thirty minutes later. She carried folded clothes and a plate of grilled vegetables and soybean curd in her arms, a charged disruptor in her lab-coat pocket. She wasn’t going to make the mistake of entering the quarantine room unarmed a second time, not even with the sedative she’d pumped into the chamber. Not so long as her guest, the noah, was so adept at freeing himself from his bonds and moving with such astonishing speed and silence.

The noah was sitting on the floor, slumped in one of the chairs near the gurney. He was still conscious – she’d been careful to keep the sedative dose mild – but he wasn’t going to be making any sudden moves on her this time. Eve dialed the code to filter the air, then opened the quarantine chamber and entered.

She needed to hurry. Misha would be done with her current training session in ten minutes, and Eve knew the child would make a beeline for this part of Homebase as soon as the training helmet lifted. The visitor would draw her like a magnet. After all, he drew Eve the same way. But until Eve understood exactly who the man was and what he was capable of, letting Misha near him while was conscious seemed like a very bad idea.

“I brought you a change of clothes,” she told the noah. “They should fit. I used your own clothes as a measurement. Once that sedative wears off, eat your food and get dressed. I’ll be back in an hour to check on you.” She started for the door.

The drugs in his system should have kept the noah too lethargic to move for at least another ten minutes.

Instead, the moment her back was turned, the man erupted from the chair. One second he was slumped over in a chair in an apparent mild trance, the next he was pressed against her back, pinning her to the wall, one hand slapped against the glass on either side of her.

“I was made to walk among your kind, but I am not of your kind,” he said. “My body does not process your drugs as your own does. Nor do I lie, as your kind has always done. Next time, when I say I am no threat, believe me.”

Eve’s heart was in her throat. He was very tall, and very strong. And every inch of him was pressed against her back, hot and hard and intimidating. His mouth was pressed close to her ear. She swallowed heavily. “If this is your idea of nonthreatening, you are not as familiar with the nuances of my culture as you think.”

The noah pulled one of his hands away from the wall and slid it down the side of her waist. The hand moved around the front of her belly and went slower still. Eve’s mouth went dry.

“What are you doing?”

He thrust his hand into the pocket of her lab coat and retrieved her disruptor. “I let you shoot me with this once. I will not do so again. It hurts.”

He’d let her shoot him?

“I have shown you how quickly I can move,” he murmured in her ear. “Yet you still doubt me? I had not counted you for a fool.”

“I’m not. I’m sorry.” Oh, God. He had the disruptor. He had just proven how easily he could overpower her. If he got out of the quarantine space into Homebase . . . he could kill her easily. He could kill them all.

The noah gave a frustrated sound and grabbed her hand. With a yank, he spun her around and pushed her towards the center of the room. “I will not kill you. I do not kill. I told you, I am a preserver of life, not a destroyer of it.” He cupped the disruptor in his hands and squeezed. Eve heard a crack and a sizzling pop, then he tossed the charred, smoking chunks of metal on the floor between them. “There, do you see? I no long have the disruptor, and you can no longer shoot me with it.” He rubbed the spot on his naked ribs.

Her earlier blast had left an ugly bruise.

“Do you read minds?” How else would he have known what she was thinking?

“Thoughts are energy. I am skilled at manipulating energy. And just so you know, I only remained in this room to put you at ease. You cannot hold me here except by my choice.” He touched the lock on the door behind him, and with a snick and a pop, the seal depressurized, the lock turned and the door swung open. “There is no technology you possess that I cannot manipulate.” Instead of walking through the door, he stepped back, hands open, palms up in an unmistakable gesture of surrender. “But I will stay here, in this room, to prove that you have nothing to fear from me.”

“Good, then I won’t have to shoot you myself.” Nonna stepped into the open doorway, a much larger disruptor in her hands. Dre stood at her back, also armed. Despite their gray hair, they both looked deadly.

Eve watched the noah’s expression go blank. For the first time, the humans had managed to surprise him, it seemed. Those brilliant blue eyes of his darted from her face to Nonna’s, then Dre’s. “You are the same,” he said. “You are the same woman, but different ages of the same.”

“The technical term is clones,” Eve said. She walked forward, putting herself between the noah and her family. “It’s all right, Nonna, Dre. He has proven that if he meant to harm us, he could easily have done so by now.” She waited for the two women who looked like older copies of herself – who, in fact, were exactly that – to lower their weapons.

She turned back to the noah to find him watching them with a mix of surprise, curiosity and bemusement.

“Remarkable,” he said. “It is a rare day that humans can still surprise me.”

“Clearly, you’ve never met the daughters of Eve before,” Dre said.

“Clearly.” The corner of his mouth tilted up in the very faintest of smiles.

“Eat your food, and I will explain,” Eve said.

“He can put some clothes on first,” Nonna commanded sharply. “Our baby’s almost done with her training vids, and she doesn’t need that particular anatomy lesson yet.” She nudged the tip of her disruptor towards the noah’s groin, indicating the penis that had been in a rather impressive state of semi-arousal since the moment the noah had pinned Eve’s body to the airlock door.

“My sisters and I are all genetic copies of Dr Eve Cartwright, a scientist who lived and died before the End.”

Eve and the noah were sitting at a table in the dining hall, the remains of his meal pushed off to one side. Shar, Dre, and Misha – who after a slightly heated discussion with Nonna had been allowed to join them – were there as well. Nonna had absented herself, saying she had too much work to do.

The noah had donned the tunic and trousers Eve had brought earlier, and though she would never admit it out loud, she missed being able to covertly admire his lean, muscular beauty in its natural state. She didn’t think she’d successfully kept that thought to herself, though, because every few minutes he would shift in his chair and stretch in a way that drew her eyes to his chest or arms or elsewhere, and she would feel his eyes on her. It was very distracting.

“Dr Eve Cartwright and her father saw what was happening between the Alliance and the Cartel, and they knew where the escalating tensions would lead,” Dre said, picking up where Eve had left off, as she had been doing every time Eve lost her train of thought. “They understood the destructive potential of the doomsday weapons the Cartel and the Alliance had amassed. So they bought an abandoned government bunker and refitted it to serve as a survival enclave and a laboratory, and among other things, they stored five thousand embryonic clones of Dr Cartwright so that her work would continue beyond her own human lifespan.”

“And it has,” Eve added. “Every twenty-five years, two new embryos are gestated and raised by the others. Nonna and Dre are the seventy-fourth generation of Eve’s daughters. I am the seventy-fifth. Shar and Misha are the seventy-sixth.”

“What work is it that all you generations of Eves are continuing?” The noah crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. Eve sighed and tried to smother images of running her hands across his chest.

“The survival of our species and our world,” Dre said. “Come. Let us show you.”

Misha held out a hand to the noah. She beamed a huge, beautiful smile up at him when he took it, and she skipped happily by his side as Eve escorted him through Homebase.

“Homebase is a self-sustaining, geo-thermal-powered biosphere,” Eve informed him. “We cannot support a large colony of life, only about a half dozen adults at any given time. So that is why each generation of Eves gestates only two more sisters for the next generation. We live together, teach each other, keep Dr Cartwright’s work alive and going – and with her work, her hope for renewed life on this planet.”

She escorted the noah through the laboratories and living spaces of Homebase. “Each of us record our discoveries, observations, thoughts into the Mind of Eve, the mainframe computer that operates all aspects of Homebase. And each successive generation of Eve’s daughters is imprinted through the neural trainers with the memories and life experiences of all the Eves that came before. In this way, each generation continues where the other left off. No discovery is ever lost. Our collective consciousness continues to expand and grow.”

She opened a door into the large brightly lit conservatory that had been designed to look like a forest meadow, complete with a waterfall tumbling down rocks into a small stream. “We maintain four of these conservatories, as well as two gardens where we grow our own fruits and vegetables. The plants all came from seeds and seedlings that Dr Cartwright and her father collected before the End, with the intention of sustaining life in Homebase and ultimately re-seeding the world. Once the planet becomes habitable again, which should be in another few hundred years, we will begin gestating the other embryonic lifeforms the first Eve and her father collected.”

“You have made yourselves into noahs,” he observed when the tour was done.

“You sound surprised. Did you think we would not want to save our own species?”

“No,” he answered honestly. “In my experience, your kind has been hopelessly bent on its own self-

destruction.”

“Then you have never experienced the love of a mother holding her newborn child,” Eve said. She ran a hand over Misha’s braided hair. “I assure you, she would do anything in her power to stop harm from befalling her child.”

Misha gave a huge yawn. “I’m tired.”

Shar stepped forward, bending down in order to pick up the child. “I’ll carry you to bed, Mimisha.”

“No.” With a fractious scowl, Misha evaded her sister. “I want her – him – to carry me.” She pointed at the noah and held up her arms in clear invitation. Her pearly teeth beamed up at him in a beguiling smile.

Eve leaned against the doorframe, watching as the noah succumbed to Misha’s charms and tucked the little girl into her bed for the night. He was so gentle with her. Tender and attentive. Even Nonna had to give her grudging approval.

A pensive smile played about Eve’s lips. If ever she started to think there was no purpose to life, if ever she started to think the struggle was too hard, too pointless, she had only to look at Misha’s smiling face, hear her small, pert, girlish voice, and Eve’s heart filled with overwhelming love and determination.

Hard, the struggle indeed might be, but for Misha, it was worth it. Anything was worth it. Because in Misha, the beauty of life glowed with its most enchanting promise.

Since the moment Eve had first held the wriggling infant in her hands, she’d known such love as she never knew existed – never knew could exist. She’d spent so many nights wide awake, just lying beside the baby, staring at her absolute perfection, marveling at each incredibly tiny finger and toe, the plump perfection of her rosebud lips and tiny, curling black eyelashes. And Eve had known in those moments that life was worth any hardship, any sacrifice. Life was the greatest gift in the universe. The one never to be squandered. The gift that made everything else worthwhile.

Through Misha, Eve had discovered what Nonna and Dre had learned before her. Unconditional love.

Complete selfless-ness. Having Misha, holding Misha, caring for her every need, teaching her, loving her, watching her grow . . . those moments had given every other moment in Eve’s life meaning and purpose.

She had looked upon Misha’s tiny, newborn face, held her tiny, newborn hand, and known she would fight for Misha to her last breath, suffer for her gladly, die for her without a qualm.

She wondered, as she watched the noah brush a broad hand tenderly across Misha’s brow, if he had ever known such a love.

“No,” he said half an hour later, as she and he wandered the trails in one of the conservatories. Shar, Dre and Nonna had also turned in for the night, but Eve was too charged from the day’s events to consider sleeping.

“No what?”

“No, I’ve never known the kind of love you feel for Misha.”

She cast him a sideways glance. “You really should stop reading people’s minds. Thoughts should be private.”

“I always find more truth in thoughts than words.”

She didn’t doubt that for an instant. “How old did you say you are?”

“Thirty thousand of this world’s years.”

“Thirty thousand.” She shook her head. She could still hardly believe it. “And in all that time, you’ve never known love?”

“No.”

“You never even thought about it? What it would be like to have a wife, a child of your own?”

“I am a noah, a watcher. My duty is to tend the worlds in my care, not to tend my own desires. Besides, I have seen what becomes of worlds, of love and families. Why would I want to subject a family of my own to such a fate?”

She was starting to get an idea of what his existence had been like, and she wasn’t liking what she saw.

He’d been alone. Utterly alone. Alone in a way she’d never known. She’d always had her sisters, Nonna, Dre, Beri until she’d died, then the little ones Shar and Misha. There might not be anyone else alive in the world, but they’d always had each other. The noah, he’d never had anyone. Ever. The mere thought made her want to cry. No one should ever be separated from the rest of the world for so long.

“I’m sorry,” she said, laying a hand on his arm. His skin felt so smooth and warm.

He stared at her hand, a strange expression on his beautiful face. “I do not understand. For what reason are you sorry?”

“No one should ever have to be that alone.” Those perfect, drowning blue eyes captured her again. If there was a heaven – and she believed there was – its skies would be that particular shade of blue. A blue the oceans would envy. A blue a woman could happily drown in.

He shrugged off her hand. “To be a noah is to be alone. I knew my purpose. I did my duty.”

“I’m sure you did.” She could see the topic made him uncomfortable, so she took pity on him. “Tell me what this world was like thirty thousand years ago.”

“Much greener.”

She laughed, and was rewarded by that faint smile that lurked along the corner of his mouth. It softened him, made him look younger, more approachable, a little mischievous.

“It was . . . peaceful . . . but also savage. Before men built their civilizations, before they made their machines, survival was their goal. Their lives were short, as you can imagine, with no medicine or technology. But there was a certain beauty to the simplicity of their lives. Of all the ages, that has always been my favorite. Because in those ages, the people . . . needed each other, much the same way you and your sisters need each other here. Of course, even then, they fought. For territory, for females, for food and resources.”

“All creatures fight for survival. It’s instinct. A bit like the way you don’t like to be caged, I imagine.”

Blue eyes glanced sideways. “I spent a lifetime – thousands of lifetimes – confined to my ship. When I am away from it, no, I do not like to be restrained.”

“I can understand that.” They’d reached the waterfall. The terrarium lights had darkened, simulating night, and the softer silver lights reflected off the water in the stream. “And those more primitive humans from the ages you admired . . . did you . . . harvest . . . them the way you did the plants and animals?”

“No. My duty is to preserve whatever life is in danger of extinction. They never were.”

“And now? Did you come here to harvest us?”

“I came here to die.”

“What?” She stared at him in shock. “Why?”

“I no longer see the point in my existence. Nothing ever changes. The patterns are fixed.”

“But . . .”

“There are no others on this planet besides you Eves. The men who engineered the End did their work very well. And when I saw it happening, I watched and I did nothing. I did not harvest human archetypes to carry on to the next world I had prepared for them, because I knew they would only destroy that world, too. And now, this world does not have much time left. What the final war did not destroy, an asteroid will in four months’ time. This world will be wiped clean. It is inevitable.”

“Inevitable.” Eve had never believed anything was a done deal. She came by that honestly – an inherited family trait. If the original Eve had believed in inevitability, she wouldn’t have built this place.

“My sisters and I may be scientists, but we deal in hope, not inevitability. Homebase is deep enough to survive an impact. And being geo-thermal-powered, even if the ejecta from impact were to remain in the atmosphere and lower global temperatures for a decade, we could survive it.”

“To what end?” he challenged wearily. “I’ve seen your thoughts. I know why you and your sisters incubate only females. But you cannot sustain a population on the clones of Dr Eve Cartwright forever.

And you cannot replicate yourselves indefinitely, either. Eventually, you will have no choice but to turn to your cache of stored embryos to create a self-sustaining population of males and females. The problem is, once you do that, you lose the control Eve Cartwright built into her system. Once your civilization grows beyond a small, tightly knit tribe, you will reach the beginning of the next End.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because I’ve seen it. Over and over and over again. Every human world ends the same, in violence and self-destruction. Again and again, I have watched civilizations grow, watched them turn on one another and rip each other apart, watched them create bigger, stronger, more powerful weapons until they destroy not only themselves but the very planets that sustain them. It is always the same. Not just on this world, but on the dozens of others I have watched as well. There’s no point in hoping for a different outcome. It is always the same. So it has ever been, so shall it ever be.”

“You’re wrong. Things can change. Your very existence is proof of that.” She nodded at his look of disbelief. “Think about it. Why else would the creator send noahs to harvest the seeds of life from one dying planet and transport them to another? Don’t you see? You are humanity’s chance to try again, and to keep trying until we get it right. What else would you call that, if not hope?”

The noah bowed his head, shoulders slumping forward in an expression of pure weariness.

“Foolishness,” he whispered. “To try the same, failed experiment again and again, that is foolishness.”

He looked so discouraged, so beaten down by the many disappointments of his long existence. He was such an ancient soul, but at this moment, he reminded her of Shar the time she’d fallen down a cliff during one of their expeditions and broken her leg. Hurt, wounded, in need of love and comfort. Eve’s hand reached out instinctively to brush back the fall of golden silk, as she’d been itching to do since she’d first uncovered his face.

He stiffened at her touch, spine going rigid, shoulders squaring.

“The experiment has too many variables to ever be the same,” she told him. “You and I have never met before, have we?”

“No.”

“There, you see. The experiment is already different.” She smiled. And then, because he was so beautiful, so sad, so alone, and because she knew that once he left, this chance would never come again, Eve did what she’d been wanting to do since she’d watched him tuck Misha into bed.

She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

His mouth was silky soft and warm, his eyes wide open and locked intently with hers. She brushed her lips against his, nibbling a little, touching her tongue to his lower lip. Tendrils of heat curled in her belly.

Tingling sensations gathered in her breasts and groin. She drew back, smiling at the way his lips followed her, and knelt over his lap, straddling him so that they were face to face, chest to chest. Comfortable, feeling bolder, she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her body tight to his.

“Beautiful, beautiful man.” She smiled into his eyes and stroked the golden hair back off his forehead.

“You’ve been alone so very long.” She cupped his face in her hands, loving the silky smoothness of his skin, the contrast of her darker flesh against his lighter, more golden tones. Bending closer, she feathered kisses across his face. “Don’t you think it’s time to come out of the cold?” She breathed the last into his ear, and followed it with an impulsive flick of her tongue.

He shuddered. His arms came up, locking her in a tight embrace. His head tilted to one side, mouth slanting across hers with sudden fervor. His hands found her hips and pressed her down against his lap, against the rock-hard bulge beneath the clothes she’d given him.

Eve gasped as dizzying sensations swept through her in rippling waves. The edge of his teeth scraped down her exposed neck. The moist heat of his breath warmed her skin. Lips and tongue tracked burning trails down her chest. His hand caught in her dense curls, and he pulled her head back, baring her chest, her breasts to his mouth and teeth and lips and tongue.

“Dear God!” Just that fast, she was on fire. Breath heaved from her lungs. His teeth closed around one nipple through the thin cloth of her tunic. She sobbed and ripped at the fabric, wanting those teeth, those lips, on her naked skin. Cool air kissed her breast, turning dark brown nipples into hard, pebbled points as she flung the tunic away. And then his mouth followed the caress of the breeze, suckling with strong, hard pulls. The feeling ignited a taut, fiery cord that reached from each nipple straight down to her core.

She moaned and thrust herself against him, pressing her breast into his mouth, clutching his hair in tight fists and pulling him tight against her.

Then they were ripping at the rest of their clothes. Who tore what from whom, she would not remember, nor did she care. All she cared about – all she wanted – was the pure, sensual fire of his naked flesh pressed against hers, rubbing against her, driving her wild.

“I’ve never—” She gasped. “Never – ah!” His fingers had found a spot between her legs, and sensation exploded across every nerve ending. Hot creamy moisture drenched her, making her body slick and steamy.

“Nor I, Eve. You are so beautiful. I never . . . knew . . .” He guided the thick, hard length of his erection to her. The wide, silky-soft head pushed against her, into her, pressure building, stretching . . . The tendons in his neck stood out. His muscles flexed and trembled.

She panted, rocking against him, biting her lip to stop from sobbing. “Don’t stop . . . don’t . . .” Her eyes squeezed shut. Something gave way. She registered a sharp pain, but then he was full inside her, hot and throbbing and filling an emptiness she’d never known existed. He moved his hips, and gripped hers to raise her up, then brought her sharply back down upon him.

“Oh, my God . . .” Stars exploded across her vision. There was a word for this moment: ecstasy. But she’d never understood the magnitude of what that word meant until now. It swept her up in a firestorm, flung conscious thought to the winds. She wasn’t Eve Cartwright, scientist. She wasn’t Eve Cartwright, sister. Not even Eve Cartwright, mother.

She was just Eve.

Woman.

Born for this moment, for this man.

He moved inside her, above her, through her, body and soul. He moved, and her world moved with him, following his lead every shuddering, breathtaking, mind-shattering step of the way. Her nails scraped across the broad, strong blades of his shoulders as her feminine core clenched tight around him, suckling him with strong, rippling quakes. He flung her onto her back and crouched over her, hips pistoning, driving his body deep inside her in swift, hard, rhythmic thrusts until she screamed and exploded yet again, and then his body went rigid, as hard and unyielding as steel. He shuddered against her, and thrust into her one, two, three final times before collapsing to one side, his chest heaving like bellows.

“Dear God.” Eve gasped and flung an arm across her face. She struggled to catch her breath. “You may not think much of the human race, but you can’t honestly tell me that isn’t worth saving.”

One eyelid cracked open. One stunning blue eye peered at her. He laughed. And the rich, deep sound of it nearly made her climax all over again.

Overwhelmed with emotion, humor fading, Eve brushed her fingertips against his jaw. She couldn’t believe this was real – couldn’t believe he was real. “You said you came here to die. But would you consider something else instead? Like staying here to live? With me?”

He propped himself up on one elbow, his expression turning serious. With his free hand, he brushed the sweaty curls away from her temple. His gaze swept slowly over her face, as if drinking in the memory of her at this moment. For one, heart-stopping moment, she thought he was going to say goodbye, but then the corner of his mouth tilted up in a wondering smile, as if he had just discovered an unexpected treasure.

“Yes,” he murmured. He bent down to kiss her, lips brushing against hers with exquisite tenderness.

“Yes, Eve, I think I would like that. I think I would like that very much.”

The rover flew over the dunes of the wastes. Eve gripped the steering wheel firmly between her gloved hands to keep from constantly touching the man sitting beside her. In the back seat of the rover, Shar and Misha clung to the roll bar and laughed with a joyous abandon Eve had only ever seen on holovids of long-dead families from before the End.

The noah had decided to stay. He would take Beri’s place in Homebase and add his collected samples of their world to their own. Together, they would bring life back to their planet. They were going now to fetch his ship. He had assured Eve that the outer hull of the ship had absorbed the bulk of the energy from the crash, and he was certain he could pilot it back to Homebase, where they could work on a way to transfer his biological storage units into their warehouses.

Like the children, Eve was bubbling over with happiness. She’d lived her whole life with just her sisters around her, but now that the noah had come, she couldn’t imagine a life without him.

Nonna, who wasn’t big on change – especially change involving the presence of a man in their midst – hadn’t been as enthusiastic as her younger sisters, but she had come around after the noah offered her full access to his ship’s computers and his vast organic library of plants and animal life long since extinct on their world. Science was her weakness, and it didn’t take the noah long to ferret out how best to win her over. Mind-reading definitely had its benefits.

“You know, you still haven’t told me your name.” Eve maneuvered the rover around a rocky outcropping. The green lights on her in-helmet display showed the map she was following to the coordinates of the noah’s ship. “I can’t go on calling you ‘the noah’ forever.”

“I have no name. I and my brothers are just the noahs. There has never been need for more.”

“Well, there’s need now. We could call you Noah, if you like.”

He considered it briefly, then shook his head. “No. A noah is what I was, and what I am no longer.

Now, I am just a man.”

“Then we’ll come up with a name for you. We’ll have to give it some thought. Names are important things. You wouldn’t want to be called something horrible like Englebart or Euphaestus.” When he didn’t answer, she darted a worried look his way. He had lifted the polarized visor on his biosuit helmet, and through the glass faceplate, she saw him mouthing the names and frowning in consideration. Oh Lord, what had she done? He was seriously going to pick one of those. “No. We are not calling your Englebart – and not Euphaestus either. That was a joke.”

“But I think Eve and Englebart has a nice sound to it,” he protested.

“No, it doesn’t. Believe me. It absolutely doesn’t.”

White teeth flashed in a mischievous grin and she realized she’d been had. Then he laughed, low and deep, and the sound rippled through her body, bringing back visceral memories of last night and all the hours of shattering pleasure.

“Oh, God.” Eve gripped the steering wheel harder. “Stop that. Don’t laugh like that. You know what it does to me.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I do.” He sounded smug, but in an utterly adorable and sexy way.

“What does he do to you, Eve?” Misha piped up.

It was a good thing Eve’s biosuit covered her completely, because she did a full body blush. “Er . . . nothing, Mimisha. The noah is just being silly.” To the culprit in question, she muttered, “Down, Euphie.

Behave. The kids are in the car.” Then, louder, in tones of exaggerated brightness, she exclaimed, “Oh, look! We’re here.” The rover rounded the corner of the last dune, and approached the crash site.

As they drew near, Eve’s good humor evaporated. The ship was still there, where she’d left it, but the area around the ship was strewn with wreckage and riddled with large, charred craters. Several bodies lay sprawled in the sand.

“Ghosts.” Eve maneuvered the rover closer, her gaze sweeping the area for any hint of movement.

“Girls, stay in the rover.” Though she spoke in a low whisper, her tone left no room for debate. “Shar, charge your disruptor and keep it handy.”

“Roger.” Shar moved closer to Misha. “Get down, Mimisha. There’s a good girl.”

Eve climbed out of the rover, disruptor in hand, and crept toward the ship. “I don’t understand. Ghosts don’t have advanced technology, but these craters look like laser fire.”

“They are.” The noah crouched down beside one of the Ghost bodies and turned it over. The lumpy, misshapen face with its lipless mouth and bared, sharpened teeth snarled up at them. There was a charred hole in its chest. “My weapon – the one I had when you found me – did you take it with you?”

Eve thought back. Much had happened in such a short time. “No, I didn’t. You think Ghosts did this?”

“The Ghosts may be more beast than man, but their ancestors were human. If they found my weapon, it wouldn’t take much for them to figure out how to fire it.” He headed for the open door in the side of his ship.

“What are you doing?” Eve chased after him. “Wait! They could still be in there.”

“No, the ship is empty.” He disappeared into the ship.

Swearing, Eve followed. And what she found inside made her heart sink. “Oh, noah, I’m sorry.” The interior of his ship had literally been torn apart by scavenging Ghosts.

The noah ignored the mess and headed to a console near the pilot’s seat at the front of the craft. Lights were still flickering. The ship still had power. He punched a button, and a flat panel display emerged from a console. Lights flashed in patterns Eve did not understand.

The noah’s finger moved swiftly, typing and tapping at the display, bringing up several screens filled with more flashing lights.

Suddenly, he swore and took off at a fast stride to the back of his ship, stopping beside what looked like a flat, crystal panel shimmering with more lights. Using his fingertips, he dragged four of the lights around in an intricate pattern, then slapped his palm flat. The wall opened, revealing a rack of metal objects.

“What’s wrong?” Eve asked.

“The weapon that made those craters out there had several other settings. The Ghosts have it and they’ve managed to put it on the highest setting.” He pulled several flat, egg-shaped devices from one of the shelves and stuffed them in the thigh pocket of his biosuit. With his other hand, he reached for a much larger, silver cylinder set with a blue-white crystal at one end. He clipped a strap to the cylinder and slung it over one shoulder.

“So?”

“So, I checked the locator on the weapon. The Ghosts are headed for Homebase, Eve.”

Fear shot through her, and for one long minute all she could do was stand there, paralyzed. She’d seen her sister, Beri, slaughtered by the Ghosts. The image haunted her to this day.

“The Ghosts have followed us back to Homebase before,” she said. Somehow, she managed to keep her voice steady. Breathe, Eve. Just breathe. Hysteria helps no one. “The walls are steel-reinforced concrete, twenty feet thick, and the outer airlock doors are solid titanium. They can’t get in.”

He gave her a grim look. “If they fire the weapon on its current setting, I’m afraid they can.”

Eve’s calm evaporated. She bolted for the door. “Shar, get on the comms! Call Homebase! Hurry!”

She raced across the debris-strewn sands and leapt into the rover’s driver’s seat. She slammed the gears into reverse and slapped a foot on the accelerator. Sand spat out from beneath the tires. The noah leapt into the passenger seat as she was pulling away.

“What is it?” Shar cried. “What’s wrong? Nonna and Dre aren’t answering. Why aren’t they answering?”

Huddled on the floor of the back seat, a frightened Misha began to cry.

“Keep trying, Shar.” Dread filled Eve’s veins with icewater.

“I’m sorry, Eve,” the noah said. “I should have returned to my ship as soon as I regained consciousness to ensure it was locked down. This is my fault.”

Fear for her sisters made her lash out. “Why do you even have weapons aboard your ship if your mission is all about preserving life? Or was that a lie?”

“I have never lied to you. I never will. I am a noah, and my mission is to preserve life. But not all lifeforms in the universe are peaceful. Sometimes, even a noah must fight to protect the worlds he watches.”

Behind them, Shar continued to call out on the wide-area comms, “Rover to Homebase, come in. Rover to Homebase, come in. Nonna! Dre! Answer me!” Her voice cracked.

They’d reached the edge of the wastes, and the ride got bumpier as the rover sped over rocky mountain terrain. Eve kept up a desperately whispered mantra as she drove. “Please, God, please God, please, let them be safe. Please, let them be safe.” But when they reached the base of Mount Nuru and saw the smoke hovering in the air above the entrance to Homebase, Eve knew her prayers had gone unanswered.

A pack of Ghosts were huddled in the middle of the road near the blackened hole that had been Homebase’s solid titanium airlock door. Their hands and faces were smeared with blood, and they were fighting like feral dogs over something that Eve feared to look at too closely.

The noah stood up in his seat, slinging the metal cylinder atop his right shoulder. The crystal at the front of the cylinder began to glow a vivid blue. Then there was a blinding flash, and the pack of Ghosts disapppeared in an explosion of blue-white light.

Turning, the noah fired another blast toward the side of the mountain, taking out another seven Ghosts hiding among the rocks. “Eve, you and the girls take cover by that rock over there. I will go look for Nonna and Dre.”

She shook her head. “No. We’re coming with you. We’re safer if we all stick together.”

For a moment, she thought he might argue, but then he said “Fine!” and reached into the pocket of his biosuit. “Here, take these.” He held out two of the flattened-egg-shaped metal objects to Eve and Shar.

“To fire, put your thumb in the depression here and your fingers in the depression here on the underside, then just point and squeeze.” He demonstrated with the third device, and made them do the same to show they understood. “Good. And be careful. The beam will vaporize whatever it touches. Misha, you stay between the three of us at all times. If you see a Ghost, let us know right away. Understand? Then let’s go.”

Together, the four of them walked through the charred airlock into Homebase.

What met them inside was total destruction. The airlocks had been vaporized, the rooms and equipment torn apart. The Ghosts hadn’t destroyed the power station yet, because the lights were still on, but sparks sputtered from torn wiring and smashed electronics. No room had been left untouched. Even the plants in the conservatories had been ripped up by their roots.

There were splashes of blood on the walls and over a dozen Ghost bodies littering the floors of several rooms. Nonna and Dre had clearly put up a fight, but of the two eldest Eves, there was no sign.

Then they entered the room that housed the Mind of Eve. The computers were shredded and sparking like mad, their torn surfaces splattered with red.

“Misha, Shar, get behind me,” Eve whispered. She raised her weapons – disruptor in one hand, the egg-shaped device in the other.

Growls and snarls and wet, smacking noises were coming from behind one of the destroyed computer banks. Eve and the noah had started to creep around the corner when Shar brushed against the edge of one of the computers and dislodged a torn faceplate. It fell to the floor with a loud clatter.

Shrieks erupted. Half a dozen Ghosts leapt up and over the computer bank, claws extended, bloodied maws filled with sharpened fangs. Misha screamed. Eve, Shar and the noah fired. A blinding light flashed and the wall beside Eve simply disappeared. Eve turned to see an enormous Ghost holding the missing weapon from the noah’s ship in one massive, blood-soaked paw. The Ghost pinned its savage gaze on her and pointed the weapon again.

“Get down!” The noah shoved Eve and the girls to the floor just as a second blast took out the spot where they’d been standing. The noah hit the ground in a roll and came up firing. His laser enveloped the last Ghost, vaporized it in an instant.

The ensuing silence was broken only by the sound of sparking wires and Misha’s muffled weeping. The noah stood up and began a final sweep of the room. Eve and the girls started to follow, but when Eve caught sight of a bloody femur stripped of flesh lying on the floor where the Ghosts had been congregated, she gasped and grabbed the girls, holding them against her body so they could not see.

“Noah . . . is that . . . is it . . . ?”

He rounded the corner. She heard him take a deep breath, and knew what he’d found.

“No.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, no. No.”

“I’m sorry, Eve.” He pointed his weapon and fired one last time, vaporizing the remains of her oldest sisters. Then he returned to gather them all into his arms. “I’m so sorry.” And he held them all until their tears were spent, then gently guided them out of the ruins of their home into the rover, and drove them back to his ship.

Once he closed the door and re-established a breathable atmosphere inside the vessel, Eve helped the girls out of their biosuits and tucked them into the noah’s berth, staying with them until their tears ran dry and exhaustion dragged them into sleep.

She walked back to the front of the ship. The noah had tidied the worst of the mess and was standing with his palms flat against the walls of the ship. Glowing light flowed from his palms and tracked along the walls, and as she watched, the damaged surfaces began to repair themselves.

He took his hands from the wall and turned to hold out his arms. She went to him without hesitation, surrendered herself to his embrace, and let her tears flow.

“What are we going to do?” she whispered when the storm of grief finally passed. “Homebase is destroyed, and without it, we can’t stay here.”

“No, we can’t stay here, but I know a place where we can go.” He stroked her hair, kissed her tear-

dampened face, and held her tight. “If you are willing, Eve, I will be a noah – your noah – one last time.”

“The girls and I have decided on a name for you.” Eve cast a teasing smile at the beautiful, golden-haired man sitting in the pilot seat of the noah’s spacecraft. The wide vidscreen before them showed the video feed from the ship’s cameras as they descended to the lush, green-and-blue planet the noah had said would suit them as their new home.

Two weeks had passed since the destruction of Homebase and the deaths of Nonna and Dre. Although sadness for their lost loved ones still frequently overwhelmed Eve and her sisters by surprise, resulting in sudden bouts of weeping, they were finally beginning to laugh again. The resilience of the human spirit was fighting back against despair.

“Oh?” the noah asked. He arched a brow, magnificent blue eyes twinkling. “I thought you’d already settled on Euphie.”

“That was just for fun, silly,” Misha chided, her grin so wide Eve wondered why it didn’t split her cheeks.

“We chose an Old Tongue name for you,” Eve said.

“Yeah, you’re always saying how you’re done being a noah and are ready to be just a man,” Shar added. “So that’s the named we picked for you.”

“Adam,” Eve said. “It’s the Old Tongue word for man.”

“Adam.” He rolled it around experimentally on his tongue, then nodded. “I like it. Very well, Adam it is.” He leaned over to plant a lingering kiss on Eve’s lips.

With a quiet hiss, the landing gear deployed and the spacecraft lowered itself gently to the ground.

Adam punched a few lights on the command console, and the side door opened with a slow whoosh.

“Eve, Shar, Misha, welcome to your new home.” Adam held out an arm, escorting the three out of the ship and onto the sweetly fragrant grass that grew in abundance beneath the magnificent branches of the forest trees. “I call it Eden.”