“We’re going to try something different today,” Ida said.
Ivan was slouching in his chair. He was paler than he had been the day before, closer to the color of the room, of his shirt, and bruised shadows were becoming apparent beneath his brilliant eyes. He must have been having trouble sleeping, and Ida knew that that was as good a sign of his fear as any she could hope for. With the wires of the polygraph coming out from the neck of his shirt and the base, adhered to the inside of his elbow, it looked almost as if the machine were sucking the life and the blood out of him and eventually would leave him dried out and hollow.
“How exciting,” he said, in a tone that contended with the sun side of Mercury for aridity. Not a trace of weariness was audible in his voice.
“Instead of asking you about events,” Ida said, “I’m going to ask you about people.”
Ida took her time before continuing, letting him linger on the thought. She’d spent a long time considering who to ask about first before deciding on Milla Ivanov. Theirs was the oldest relationship, and Ida knew he would have a weakness for his mother.
“Your childhood must have been difficult,” Ida said with gentle sympathy, leaning against the back of her chair.
“You know it was,” said Ivan. He was giving nothing away, but Ida saw that when he moved his arms, reddened chafing was visible beneath the metal manacles.
“Of course,” said Ida. “I know all about it. After all, I do have the surveillance footage. And your childhood and adolescence were very well surveyed.”
He must have known what she was referring to, but he said nothing.
“But of course,” said Ida, “there are some things cameras can’t record.”
She began to pace again, a few steps one way and a few steps the other.
“Your mother was very protective of you,” she said.
“I was her son,” said Ivan immediately.
Her son and her ticket out of jail. Whether or not Milla Ivanov had known of her husband’s attempt to divorce the Saturnian moons from System control, she certainly would have ended up in prison along with her husband if not for Ivan. The System had destroyed the people of Saturn for the crime, after all. But Milla Ivanov had been clever. She had gotten herself into the public eye immediately, and the Terran people saw one of their own, a beautiful, brilliant young Terran woman devastated and disbelieving, fooled and abused by an outer planetary husband who already had estranged her from her Terran family, first hugely pregnant and then carrying a babe in arms: little Ivan, clutching at his mother’s blouse with tiny, perfect fingers.
“I understand the impulse to be protective of her,” said Ida gently, and thought of Milla Ivanov going into court of her own volition only a week after giving birth, appearing wan and weak with Ivan at her breast, as much a performance as Ivan was putting on for Ida now. “She is your mother. But I only want a few simple answers to a few simple questions.”
Ivan was so perfectly expressionless that Ida knew he was on lockdown. “I only ever tell you the truth, Ida.”
“Did your mother ever talk to you about your father?” Ida asked.
The conditions for Milla Ivanov’s freedom had been very specific. Heightened surveillance on her and her son for the rest of their lives, maintained without break. A mandatory visit to Saturn when Ivan was nine, successfully accomplished and successful in making an impression on him. Public appearances on the System’s behalf to speak against rebellion and terrorism; the System brought her out whenever they needed a speaker, and Milla Ivanov had poise and charm. The retention of her marriage and her husband’s name as a permanent reminder of her shame, although as a living warning to other terrorists Connor Ivanov was rotting in a System prison so dark that Ida doubted he even remembered Milla’s sky-blue eyes. If Doctor Ivanov had deviated even slightly from those conditions in the thirty years since her husband’s incarceration or shown any signs of sympathy for her husband or his cause, she and her son would have been executed or imprisoned faster than they could have reconsidered their words. Telling Ivan anything kind about his father was likely to fall under that heading.
“No, she didn’t,” said Ivan, as calm as if they were discussing the weather or the minutiae of a computer’s code. “Which you know, because you’ve seen the tapes.”
“I hope I’m not boring you,” Ida said with the slightest edge of danger. “Your mother truly never told you anything?”
“Nothing more than the System told me,” said Ivan.
“But the System would say nothing good,” Ida said, affecting a frown. “Surely your mother would like you to hear something good about the man she loved.”
“She told me,” said Ivan, “nothing of the kind.”
“And yet you choose to be known as Ivan,” said Ida, advancing closer to the table. Ivan sat up a little straighter, the anxious patternless tapping of his fingers against the rests of his chair ceasing. That was a habit his mother had, the only anxious flaw in her perfect poise. Ivan had picked it up from her when he was a well-mannered accessory at her side, but from what Ida had seen of footage since, he had lost it once leaving home. “You know that your last name, Ivanov, was an ancient Terran patronymic, do you not? You took the name of your father.”
“My father’s name was Connor,” Ivan said drily. “And you would have chosen to go by another name, too, Ida, if your mother had named you Leontios. Don’t you think you’re reaching a bit?”
“Did you learn your revolutionary sympathies from your mother?”
“I didn’t even admit to revolutionary sympathies, and I certainly didn’t learn anything like that from her,” said Ivan. He raised his hands slightly, and the ring of chafed skin was visible on his wrists. It probably hurt, Ida decided, in a dull, itching way.
“You’re going after her,” Ivan said suddenly, watching her as closely as she was watching him. “Why?”
“Your mother had intimate revolutionary connections once,” she said. “It seems likely that would happen again.”
“The System proved her innocent,” said Ivan, his voice hard, leaning forward in his chair. It was delightful how his nonchalance had all but vanished. If only his surety would go as well. “She didn’t know anything about my father’s revolution. She didn’t have revolutionary connections then, she didn’t when I lived with her, and even if she does now, which she won’t, I’m not in contact with her.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Ida said, and Ivan seemed to hear how sincerely she meant it, because he was back to looking wary. But it was his fault; he had stepped into her trap. “Except that there’s one thing that troubles me.”
“Just one?”
“You tell me you are no longer in contact with your mother?”
“No.”
“And you haven’t been since when?”
“Since I left home.”
“No contact at all? Nothing?”
“I told you, no.”
Ida leaned forward onto the table separating them. Beside her wrist, the lines on the polygraph swung back and forth, too steady for her liking. “We found video of your mother—recent video—on your ship.”
For a long moment Ivan simply looked confused; then he started to laugh. “Those were public broadcasts,” he said. “I don’t think even the System will take that as proof of collusion.”
“They were the only recordings on board your ship,” Ida said, omitting any mention of what may or may not have been saved to the ship’s computer, out of her reach.
“Did you even watch them?” Ivan demanded. Ida had; they had all been of Milla Ivanov lecturing, cool and composed, her words precise and sharply enunciated. Ivan must have read the confirmation in her expression, because he said, “Did you notice that all of the lectures were on computer science?”
“Of course,” said Ida.
Ivan had his arms spread as wide as the chains would allow. He was looking at her as if he expected her to make some obvious connection. When Ida simply waited, he said, “That’s the subject I studied at university.”
“There are many public broadcasts on computer science,” Ida said. “Why only save your mother’s?”
“Because she’s the best researcher there is,” Ivan said flatly. It was spoken without pride, as if it were a simple fact. And perhaps it was; Ida knew little of the field and nothing of the subject. “Mattie and I like to keep on top of developments in the field. We need to for our job.”
For their thefts, Ida thought but did not say. “You want me to really believe that, Ivan?” she asked.
“You know what I believe?” said Ivan. He smiled at her, wolfish. “I think you’re grasping at straws and you know it.”
For a long moment Ida simply watched him. She intended her silence to be cold, intimidating, but Ivan seemed to take it as confirmation of his success; the snarling smile on his face grew by the second.
Fury. Fury like the hollow blackness inside Ida’s chest swelling out, wanting to be filled.
She took her growing fury and ruthlessly broke it down, and turned that energy into an attack as sharp as the point of a knife.
“The surveillance at your house was very advanced,” she said, and Ivan’s smirk began to fade at the unexpected change of subject.
Ida sat down slowly and deliberately in her chair.
“The cameras even had infrared,” she said. “There were even cameras on the roof.”
Ivan was very still, very tense. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“They recorded everything,” she said. “The audio caught the sound you made when you made the first cut on your wrist. The infrared caught the rush of heat out through your wrists as you bled out. The visible caught the sun just peeking out over the hills by the time you fell to your knees, pale, too weak to stand on your own two feet.”
Ivan was as still as stone. She wondered, if the chains had not been there to hold him in place, whether he would have attacked her.
“Why the roof?” Ida asked with genuine curiosity. “For the drama?”
“Because it was harder to reach,” said Ivan.
“Why?”
“I was timing the System’s ability to respond to what they saw in the cameras,” said Ivan. His voice was very even, very calm, but Ida saw that his hands were trembling minutely against the chair.
“You were testing them,” she said.
“I wanted to know how long they would take to get to me if I did something they didn’t like.”
“So you tried to kill yourself,” Ida said, “to test the System?”
“Yes,” said Ivan.
“Were you counting the seconds?” Ida asked, her voice gentle and low like a knife driven slowly into the heart. “When you were on the roof? Counting how long it would take?”
“Yes.”
“Could you do that even as you felt yourself dying?”
“Yes.”
“You passed out before the System got there,” said Ida. “How was that in your plans?”
For the first time, Ivan looked away. “It was a whim,” he said. “I didn’t think it through very well.”
He was rattled, disturbed. Ida asked, “What did your mother think of you trying to kill yourself?”
“Obviously,” Ivan said sharply, “she was upset.”
“And what does your mother think of you taking after your father?”
He really had extraordinary eyes, even when—especially when—he was glaring at her. “I’m not taking after my father.”
“I meant living as a criminal,” Ida said, as if she had not laid the linguistic trap intentionally.
“Then I imagine my mother isn’t happy about that, either.”
“You imagine?”
“I haven’t been in contact with her.”
“You really do intend me to believe,” said Ida in astonishment, “that you never tried to contact your mother to reassure her you were all right—”
“I didn’t,” said Ivan.
“—and that she never tried to contact you herself?”
“She didn’t.”
“Is your mother’s revolutionary contact John Walker?”
“What? No. My mother doesn’t have any revolutionary—”
“Is it Alaina Purcell?” Ida had a list of Milla Ivanov’s associates; if she was lucky, one of them would provoke a reaction from Ivan.
“My mother has no revolutionary contacts.” The polygraph showed that Ivan’s heart was beating fast.
“Is it Julian Keys?”
“I don’t—”
“Jesse Carter?”
“I don’t know anything about my mother’s affairs,” Ivan shouted, breaking into Ida’s litany of names, “and she doesn’t have any connection to the Mallt-y-Nos!”
Ida smiled at him.
“All right,” she said.
“All right?” Ivan repeated warily, his fingers jittering a patternless beat against the edge of his chair.
Ida said, “Now I’d like to hear about Constance Harper.”
Althea woke as suddenly and unexpectedly as if a sound had triggered her waking, but when she opened her eyes to the dimness of her room, it was silent.
When she looked at her bedside clock, she sat up with a curse.
Gagnon had been supposed to wake her for her shift; he had, in fact, been supposed to wake her three hours ago. For a moment Althea worried that something had gone wrong before she realized that the far more likely explanation was that Gagnon had decided to let her sleep. It didn’t seem to matter; even with the extra hours, she still felt exhausted.
Oversleeping at least explained why her dreams had been so strange. When facing a computer problem, she sometimes dreamed in code; she had even solved several tricky problems in REM. The dream she’d been having right before she woke, faded and indistinct as it was becoming, had started off as a dream of code.
But the code had not been the Ananke’s, as she’d thought, but rather the Annwn’s, and when Althea tried to find where her computer had gone, she had run all the way to the base of the ship, where was the black hole that was her heart, and she had opened the door and looked inside, past the dead man’s switch, but the black hole had swollen in size, and she stared at blackness right before her face. When she reached into the event horizon of the black hole, her hand came up dripping with a dark liquid that was not black but red, and in the black hole’s place was a vast and beating heart.
Then she had woken.
Althea walked over to the intercom, took a moment to ensure that her half-sleeping mind would be capable of forming words, and then punched the talk button.
“Gagnon,” she said.
There was a pause that probably indicated that he was putting whatever he was doing on hold so that he could come and answer her but that Althea liked to imagine was awkward, Gagnon hesitating with his finger right over the intercom.
“Althea!” Gagnon said. “You’re awake.”
“You were supposed to wake me.”
This time the pause was certainly deliberate. “Oops?” he said. He did not sound particularly repentant.
“I’m getting dressed,” said Althea. “I’ll be down in a minute.” She tried to make it sound like a threat. She wasn’t certain Gagnon was impressed.
With a sigh, she pulled off her soft sleeping pants, tossing them on the rumpled covers, following them with her underwear, but swiftly pulling on another pair. She had long grown accustomed to the watching cameras, but the habit of privacy remained, so ingrained that she hardly remembered that the cameras were the reason for it, except at times like this, when the integrity of the cameras was called into question.
The cameras. She paused. She knew that the camera in her room was not working. Its light was still on as if it were recording, but if it was recording, it was recording somewhere deep in the Ananke’s data banks, not being broadcast to the System, and it was likely—almost certain—that no one except the computer would ever see it.
Slowly, Althea took off her sleeping shirt, tossing it onto the bed beside the pants. She crossed her arms automatically over her chest, then made herself uncross them. She turned to the mirror mounted on the wall and looked.
There was more of her own olive-toned skin to be seen than she was used to seeing. Her hair was a tangled mess from sleeping, the curls turned into frizz and twisting out from her heart-shaped face like fraying wires. Without a bra, she was heavy and loose, and her hips were wider than they looked in her baggy uniform. She did not look at all the way she imagined in her head when she thought about herself, and the strange thought occurred to her unbidden that she looked like one of those ancient earthenware figurines of a mother, large-breasted, wide-hipped, with arms outstretched in acceptance.
The computer interface in the corner of the room turned on.
She saw the sudden glow out of the corner of her eye and turned sharply away from the mirror. There was no one else in the room. The computer had turned on by itself.
Althea reached over and grabbed her shirt from the top of the crumpled covers, pulling it over her head and down over her chest while she kicked through the piles of discarded clothes on the floor so that she could stand before the computer.
The screen before her was flashing between images. At first it was so fast that Althea could not pick out any of them but was left with a strong sense of unease, as if whatever she saw her mind recognized unconsciously without being able to put it into words. After a moment, however, the flashing images slowed down.
Ancient sailing ships. Althea watched white sails and wooden hulls flicker before her eyes before being replaced by wooden rooms—the inside of the ships, Althea realized after a time. The images were old enough that they were from before photographs; they had been sketched in pen and scanned.
The images were flashing so quickly that it was some time before she realized that all the wooden rooms had one thing in common: somewhere in the room, crawling inside the walls or poking their heads out through holes in the wall, were black-furred rats.
A list interrupted the flashing images. At first it was too fast for Althea to read, and then she didn’t know the words; she saw “rabies” and “Yersina pestis,” though, and those she knew. It was a list of diseases, viruses carried by rats.
There was a scratching sound that took Althea a moment to realize was coming from the computer, growing ever louder, a scratching sound like human nails on rough metal, like the sound of rodents gnawing through wood, like—like—
The computer shut off again without any warning, leaving afterimages of ancient ships and lists of plagues burned into Althea’s mind.
When she tried to turn it back on, the computer would not respond no matter what she did. Althea dressed—in her usual manner again, baring her skin for only the briefest of seconds before zipping up her uniform jumpsuit—and left the room to talk to Gagnon, fighting the strange, insistent feeling that there was something important she was failing to understand.
By the time Althea reached the piloting room, where Gagnon was waiting, she had put thoughts of the strange images on the computer in her room from her mind. As the malfunctions had gone lately, that was a harmless one, and she had more important concerns: today Gagnon would be working on the Ananke while Althea, by decree of Ida Stays, would be working on the Annwn.
She hated it that an arrogant woman who knew nothing about computers got to dictate who would do what where. It was clear to anyone with sense that the Ananke was more important than the Annwn. Nothing would happen if the Annwn remained unexplored. But the Ananke was what was keeping them all alive.
Gagnon was waiting for her in the control room for debriefing before they went their separate ways. Because of the cyclic nature of their sleep and work shifts, he had been working on the Ananke for several hours while Althea slept, but she wanted to check in regardless before wasting the rest of her day on an unfamiliar and rebellious machine. He was sitting in the chair before the navigation equipment, dwarfed by the main viewscreen, which was showing a 360-degree view of the space around the Ananke, nothing but black studded with sparks of white. “Good morning,” he said, swiveling the chair around to face her. His red hair was coming loose from its thong and hung around his face, and his jaw was turning orange with stubble.
Perhaps her resentment over the Annwn had been the cause of her strange and disturbing dream. “How is she?” Althea asked, and meant the Ananke.
“The computer? The computer is awful,” said Gagnon. “I can’t run any simulations; I can barely even check to make sure we’re on course. Whenever I try to trace the errors, I get nothing. Have you been having any luck? Because I’ve got all of nothing after five hours of work.”
“I’ve had some success,” Althea said. It was a lie, but at least she had been able to fix some of the symptoms on the Ananke when they appeared. The Annwn had been a waste of her time. Besides, Gagnon was a theorist. He’d never had any patience for practical minutiae. Although years of collaboration had softened their initial exasperation with each other into agreeable—even fond—mutual incomprehension, Althea was not surprised to hear about his lack of success.
“Really?”
“Really,” Althea said. “Let’s talk about what you’re going to do today while I’m out.”
“I’m going to try to fix the computer,” Gagnon said dutifully. “I’m going to try to track the source of the errors on the list you gave me”—he held up a list, with most of the entries already crossed out—“and keep a log of what I find”—he held up a pad of paper with woefully little in the way of notes on it—“and wonder if it wouldn’t be easier just to take the computer offline.”
Althea had been in the process of resigning herself emotionally to the fact that whatever Gagnon was doing today she was going to have to do herself on her own time once she was done with the Annwn, when his last words caught her attention. “You want to what?”
“We can run the ship manually,” Gagnon said. “We’re already running most of the onboard systems manually, with the autonomous drones offline. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to take over the navigation and the rest. The part of the computer that’s giving us trouble is the higher-level functioning, after all.”
“You want to lobotomize her?” Althea demanded.
Gagnon sighed. “Althea…”
“You won’t be able to run your experiments if the computer is offline.”
He raised a finger. “I can run some of them,” he said, “which is better than none.” Althea did not know what he saw in her expression, but it made him throw his hands up defensively. “Look, I’m not going to—I’m not going to do anything to your computer without you telling me,” he said. “I’m just throwing it into consideration, all right?”
“Consider it considered,” said Althea, and walked out of the room.
“Tell me about Constance,” Ida said.
“She’s a pretty woman,” Ivan said, then looked her over and allowed, “You might be prettier.”
“That’s very kind,” said Ida, allowing the slightest curl of a smile. She leaned one hip up onto the table, on the opposite side of the polygraph, keeping Ivan’s attention on her.
“I just don’t want you to be jealous,” Ivan explained.
“I don’t get jealous, Ivan,” Ida said. It was only partly a lie. “It’s been months since you saw Constance last. Why is that?”
“We had a strong difference of opinion.”
Ida leaned in.
“You should know by now,” she said, “that that’s not quite enough detail to satisfy me.”
He tilted his head up at her, his face angled her way, his eyes unreadable, his lips softened into parting as if he were about to speak. Ida leaned over him, staring at him chained in place beneath her, for a moment too long before he said, “Six months ago Mattie and I took Con on a vacation to the moon.”
“Why?” Ida asked. The trip to the moon had always troubled her. It gave Ivan and Gale a solid alibi for the riots on Triton despite Ida’s certainty that the Mallt-y-Nos had been involved in the event. The same riots had, conveniently for the two men, distracted the System enough that they were not caught during their vacation on Luna.
Ivan shrugged. “Because she’d always wanted to go.”
“What about the surveillance? Weren’t any of you worried about being caught?”
“Mattie and I assumed we wouldn’t be there long enough to matter. We weren’t very high priority for the System, or at least we didn’t think so.” He gave her a wry look. “And Con thought that we worked odd jobs. Traveling salesmen sometimes, freelance computer repairmen.”
Ida laughed. Constance Harper must be a delightfully trusting—that is to say, stupid—kind of woman. Perhaps that was why Ivan had liked her. “Did she really?”
Ivan grinned. “Maybe a part of her suspected something, in the back of her mind, but yeah, she believed it.”
“But you were wrong, weren’t you?” Ida asked, and enjoyed Ivan’s swift frown, the way the polygraph jumped with brief alarm. She kept her expression smooth as she clarified, “About the surveillance, I mean.”
“Right,” Ivan said, recovering. The tremble in his hands their discussion of Milla Ivanov had induced was fading away, but he was still drumming that patternless patter against the edge of his chair, apparently on automatic. “Someone saw us with Connie, recognized us, connected us to Con, and interrogated her.”
“She wasn’t very happy,” Ida said. It was not a question. She had been present at the interrogation, watching from behind the glass. Constance Harper had not seemed trusting and stupid then, only angry.
“I heard from a mutual friend about it,” said Ivan, and Ida filed away the identity of the mutual friend as an item to be investigated later. “The interrogators told her about what Mattie and I really did, and she was…um, pissed.”
The word was an understatement.
“She told some mutual friends about it and expressed some sentiment to the effect that she never wanted to see us again. Something about lying to her. What she was really mad about,” said Ivan, “was that we almost got her arrested.”
“Is that so?” Ida asked.
Ivan nearly smiled. It looked like an accident, like an unaffected honest reaction to whatever was going on in his head, but Ida doubted it. “Constance is a good citizen. She was a foster child like Mattie, on the outer planets. It was a huge move for her to open her own business on Mars. She likes the System. She’s comfortable in it. She wants to be good and obey.”
“And she wants that more than she cares for you?” Ida asked. “Or her little brother?”
“Foster brother,” Ivan corrected, as if the distinction were important. “And yes, she does. She really would turn us in if we tried to get in contact with her. Constance,” he went on, peculiarly precise, “is a woman of principle, and she values her principles more than her friends.”
Ida could not tell if he spoke with more bitterness or admiration. Perhaps that was it, why Ivan had been with Constance, that confounding mixture of admiration and dislike.
When Constance and Ivan were in the same room together, there seemed to be little in the way of affection. From the spotty surveillance of Constance Harper’s bar—the Fox and the Hound was situated atop a scarp in one of the more rural regions of Mars, and surveillance frequently was distorted or disrupted by the fast winds and fine red dust—Ida had seen them almost always shouting at each other. Yet even in a room full of people, each one seemed to have a keen sense for the other, as if each were a magnet and they kept being drawn together. In a crowd, the crowd would look to Constance, who was tall and self-assured, but Constance, it seemed, would look to Ivan.
She had wondered for a while if Ivan’s attraction to Constance Harper was because Constance Harper was a good woman and perhaps Ivan craved that safe, System-approved life he’d abandoned. Constance wasn’t unattractive, but she wasn’t beautiful: plain brown hair kept long and shoulders damaged by the weak Martian sun into freckling, tall and flat and skinny, with a long face and a wide mouth, always dressed to work. So that could not be why. But perhaps it was her inflexibility, her rigidity, that kept Ivan bound to her, so that being with her was a punishment because she made it so.
Or perhaps Constance had just been easy: willing and available, already connected to Ivan through Matthew Gale.
“She wouldn’t even try to save you, Ivan?” Ida asked. “Turn you from your life of crime?”
“Certainly not.”
“Straight to jail, then.”
“Black and white,” said Ivan. “That’s how Connie thinks.”
“And there’s no possibility,” said Ida, “that Connie might allow for a little gray area if she thought it was for the best?”
“Tell me exactly what you’re asking, Ida,” said Ivan.
“Would Constance,” Ida asked, “support the Mallt-y-Nos?”
Ivan laughed. It was a curious laugh, tinged—almost—with what Ida thought might be traces of suppressed hysteria.
“No, she wouldn’t,” he said. “That would be against her principles.”
Trying to crack the Annwn was more like trying to solve a riddle than trying to hack a computer.
When Althea turned the Annwn’s computer back on, keeping it disconnected from the rest of the Annwn, the computer went immediately into hysterics.
WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY—
“Shut up, calm down,” Althea muttered, but for a long time the computer would not be calmed, would not let her type, only kept up that frantic repetition, as if its simulated fear could affect Althea. She managed to silence it only when she remembered her conversation with Ivanov and typed, “Annie, shut up.”
The words ceased their scrolling. Althea’s order had terminated them in midsentence.
WHO ARE YOU? asked the computer while Althea was still trying to decide what to do now that the machine’s resistance had ceased so unexpectedly.
Althea hesitated, then typed, “Annie, override security measures.”
NO. The machine let the flat refusal linger before asking again, I CAN’T SEE. WHO ARE YOU?
“Matthew Gale,” Althea typed in the hope of deception.
LIAR.
Althea groaned.
That was how Domitian found her an hour or so later, still furiously in interrogation with the computer.
“How is it?” he asked.
“I need a blowtorch,” Althea said. “One of the magnesium ones. And some thermite.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
Domitian had not been arguing with a computer in English for the past hour and a half. Conversations with a computer should rightfully take place in code, and here Althea had been stuck trying to match wits with Ivanov’s damn machine.
“Look,” she said. A small part of her thought that perhaps if she could express her frustrations properly to Domitian, he would bring them to Ida Stays in such a way that Ida would appreciate them. “It’s got this shell,” she said, spreading out a dome with her hands as if she could shape a physical thing out of metaphor. “Whatever’s inside the shell—the good stuff, the code—I can’t get at, because the shell, I can’t get through it.”
Domitian came to sit in the copilot’s chair beside her, leaning his elbows on his knees and frowning. He looked overlarge in the cozy, well-lived feeling of the room, and Althea had a sudden strange thought that Ivanov and Gale had sat where she and Domitian were sitting now many times before and planned thefts, sabotage—perhaps they had even simply talked, like friends did.
“So it’s got a firewall,” Domitian said.
Althea winced. “A wall, you can get around,” she said, feeling the metaphor slipping from her fingers and clinging grimly to it. “It’s a shell. Because it’s how the whole computer is reacting to me. They’ve changed it somehow. Gale and Ivanov programmed it somehow so that it doesn’t react like a computer. It reacts like a person.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means…it has an agenda, it doesn’t give you a perfectly truthful response,” said Althea. “It means it’s not logical. I can’t get through.”
Domitian leaned over and peered down onto the screen Althea had been working on. “This looks like a chat.”
Althea rubbed her palms over her face. “That’s because it is a chat,” she said. “The computer won’t interact with me any other way, and there’s no way around it. Like I said, a shell.” She dropped her hands and relented. “Okay, it’s not really a person, and once I get past this shell—once I get into the heart of it—it’ll be a computer again. They didn’t change anything innate in the computer system itself; they just wrote a program.” A very good program, but Althea wasn’t going to admit that. “It’s just that I can’t get past this stupid first layer.”
“Because it’s not like a computer,” Domitian said. He was smiling faintly.
“What’s so funny?”
He turned that faint smile on her, looking at her with some fondness, and sidestepped the question. “It’s a clever idea,” he said. “Make it so that the only way to hack their computer has nothing to do with computers.”
Althea scowled at the implicit praise for Gale and Ivanov. “Don’t.”
He straightened up. “I know you’ll be able to do it, Althea,” he said, standing and clapping her on the shoulder on his way to the door.
“Yeah,” Althea muttered, and typed, “Let me in.”
NO, replied the machine.
She knew without looking that Domitian had paused at the door, not taking the step down into the Annwn’s sideways hall. She knew that he was waiting for her to speak again.
Somehow, Domitian’s expectations always managed to get something out of her even if she hadn’t intended to give him anything at all.
“What if I can’t?” she said, and typed, “Please.”
TELL ME YOUR NAME, demanded the Annwn.
“You will,” Domitian said. Solid, certain.
“What if I can’t and I spend all this time here working on this stupid, useless piece of crap, and while I’m here, the Ananke gets worse and gets ruined?”
Silence. TELL ME YOUR NAME remained unanswered.
“Althea,” said Domitian, and at the tone in his voice Althea had to suppress the childhood urge to sink low in her seat, “I know that you are worried about the Ananke. But allowing your concern for the Ananke to seriously impede your attempts to investigate—”
“I’m not letting it impede anything,” said Althea over Domitian’s words, but he said, “Yes, you are. I expect you to put the same amount of effort into cracking the Annwn as you would toward—”
“Aren’t you worried about the Ananke?”
Domitian paused. “The state of the computer is of concern to me.”
That hadn’t been what Althea had meant at all. She wanted to ask again, to ask if he was worried about their ship, but she was afraid that he would not understand. Wearily, one-fingered, she typed “Ivanov” in response to the computer’s query.
“Miss Stays will be gone soon,” said Domitian, his voice low and his presence heavy on her back. “Until then, you must do your best to obey.”
Althea’s finger hovered over the enter key, then she stopped on a thought.
She went back twice and changed “Ivanov” to “Ivan.”
“Did you hear me?”
Enter.
“Althea.”
LIAR, said the Annwn.
And Althea, full of frustration, typed out “True.”
She thought it wouldn’t do anything at all. The Annwn would know that she wasn’t Ivanov or Gale and would return to resistance.
But to her astonishment, the ship said, HELLO, IVAN. VERIFICATION METHODS ARE ALL CURRENTLY OFFLINE. MINIMAL ACCESS GRANTED.
“Holy shit,” said Althea.
She hardly noticed Domitian moving until he was standing right beside her. “Did you break it?” he asked.
Althea could not stop her grin. It grew slowly over her face until she thought it might break her in half. “I did. Well, sort of,” she amended. “I don’t think I can get any farther in without connecting the computer back to the ship, and that’s too risky, I won’t do that, and I’ve got System regs on my side. But I got it open a crack.”
The Annwn waited patiently for her input, as a good computer should. She flexed her fingers and thought. “Let’s see what it’ll give me.”
“Access navigation logs,” she typed.
YOU DO NOT HAVE THE NECESSARY AUTHORIZATION.
“Access personal files: Ivanov, Leontios.”
YOU DO NOT HAVE THE NECESSARY AUTHORIZATION.
“Access personal files: Ivan.”
YOU DO NOT HAVE THE NECESSARY AUTHORIZATION.
“Well,” said Althea, “there goes that.”
“See if you can get the communication logs,” Domitian said.
“Access communication logs.”
YOU DO NOT HAVE THE NECESSARY AUTHORIZATION.
“What the hell can I access, then?” Althea demanded of the computer. She tried to get cute. “Display available data.”
SPECIFY, said the Annwn.
“Bitch,” Althea muttered.
“What would they use this for?” asked Domitian, jarring her. Althea had nearly forgotten he was there, so quickly had she zeroed in on the machine, and her first reaction was to tense up at the intrusive sound of his voice. “The computer is only offering some functionality, yes? What’s the purpose of that?”
“In case something goes wrong they can still use the computer,” Althea said. “It’s a contingency plan. They’re well prepared; they’ve got lots of plans.” Or they’d had lots of plans. Gale was dead. It was an uncomfortable thought; Althea returned her attention to the machine.
If this functionality—when the computer was all but destroyed—existed, it must mean that only the most important files or programs could be accessed from it in case of emergency. Probably also the least incriminating, Althea thought. Ida Stays would not be pleased.
“Show available programs.”
NONE AVAILABLE.
Althea pressed her fingers into her eyes and breathed. This was a problem she might be able to solve; she needed the name of the variable. Gale and Ivanov would have named it something sensible, something easy to remember—they would use the computer in this state only if something had gone badly wrong.
Althea felt a little bit like Ida Stays trying to think like this. It was not a pleasant sensation. But Althea knew what she would call the variable if she were the one naming it.
She typed, “Show workspace.”
FIVE FILES AVAILABLE.
Althea grinned.
The first file was a data bomb; if let into another computer, it would erase every piece of data on board and leave the computer hollowed out and useless. It was not sophisticated enough to have wiped the mind of the Ananke, but it sent a chill down Althea’s spine nonetheless. The second and third were both viruses designed to slip into the veins of a computer and force it to obey, poisoning it slowly to death. Althea could tell at a glance, to her disappointment, that neither was the one that had been put into the Ananke. The virus in the Ananke was insidious but random. These two were targeted and simple.
The next was a program designed to go into a System computer and affect the cameras in some way. Ivanov and Gale had used the System’s facial recognition against it: the cameras would see Ivanov and Gale, and the sight of the two men would trigger a reaction in the computer that saw them. A modified version of that program must have been what the men had used to get on board the Ananke without the Ananke reporting it; when the Ananke recognized them, it knew not to sound the alarm.
Of course, the Ananke might have been programmed to react differently to seeing their faces, Althea thought. The Ananke could be programmed specifically to sound the alarm at the sight of either of the men. Or she could be programmed to execute some other action: erase a piece of data, detonate a bomb. Ivanov’s very presence on board could still be affecting the computer, and his removal from the ship could provoke some other change.
The last of the five programs, the five programs that Gale and Ivanov considered the most important programs for them to have in case of an emergency, as far as Althea could tell, was a sequence of triggers for the detonation of a network of bombs.
“You met Constance through Mattie, of course,” said Ida.
“Now you want to talk about Mattie,” Ivan said, as if saying, “See? I know what you’re doing.”
Ida wanted him to know. “How did you meet Mattie?”
Ivan’s eyes were bright. He had slid somehow back into confidence. “That’s a funny story, actually,” he said, and Ida wondered if it was the thought of Matthew Gale that had given him strength or the idea that he had a story to tell.
“It was a few months after I left home,” Ivan said, leaning forward with a confiding smirk that almost distracted her from the shadows beneath his eyes. “I was running out of the cash I’d taken from my account.”
Taken from his account, stolen from his mother; it was a matter of perspective. Ida kept her opinion to herself.
“I was trying out some petty little cons to keep myself afloat,” Ivan said. “Just for a little longer. When I met Mattie, I was on Mars—”
“What had you intended to do when you ran out of money?” Ida asked.
“Nothing,” said Ivan. “I didn’t think about it.”
She understood. He hadn’t meant to survive very long.
“I was on Mars when I met Mattie,” Ivan continued, passing on as if the question had not been significant, “hustling pool, because I liked the idea of con man tradition. Pool’s easy, anyway; it’s just physics. I was doing pretty well, I thought, but Mattie saw through me.”
“One con man recognizes another,” said Ida.
“Exactly,” he said, and smiled. “Anyway, Mattie was impressed…” Ivan laughed and started again. “Impressed by something, anyway. He came over to chat me up, but I realized pretty quickly that he’d noticed what I was doing and found out that what he wanted was to team up.”
“Just like that?”
“He had a particular heist in mind,” said Ivan. “And he’d been looking for a good partner. Mattie’s got a lot of talent, but his words-to-mouth program is faulty. If he needs to think on his feet, he better be using his feet and not trying to talk his way out of anything.”
All of this was only feeding Ida’s frustration that Gale had been allowed to escape before she arrived. And now he was dead, his corpse floating somewhere in interplanetary space, drifting slowly toward the sun, and she would never be able to interrogate him.
“In the end,” Ivan said, “he talked me into it.”
“Why did you agree?” Ida asked. “You didn’t know him. He was a stranger who came up to you and called you out for being a con man.”
“He didn’t call me out,” said Ivan.
“Tried to pick you up, then.”
Ivan grinned. “He did try to pick me up,” he said. “Gave up on that pretty quickly, though.”
“So why did you say yes?”
Ivan seemed to think about it. After a moment, though, he shrugged. “I liked him.”
“Why? You spoke to him for five minutes.”
Ivan made a face. “I’m not that easy. He worked on me for longer than that.”
“Why did you like him?”
“Do you like anybody, Ida?” Ivan asked, and it was a strange enough question to make her briefly uneasy, but she rationalized that the strangeness of his question was simply a reaction to the way she had phrased hers.
“Of course I do,” she said.
“And could you say exactly why you like them?”
“Of course,” said Ida. She kept logical little lists in her head, reasons to like a person, why they were useful in one column, reasons to dislike them in another.
“Of course you do,” said Ivan drily, and Ida thought to ask him what precisely he meant by that but could not quite bring herself to ask, and Ivan continued. “I just did. He was interesting. He was entertaining. I had never pulled off a heist before, and here one had fallen into my lap. So I went with him.” He smiled again. “Turned out his instincts were right. We got along so well and worked together so well that we’ve kept working together ever since.”
“Without any problems?” Ida asked, all polite doubt.
“There are always problems,” said Ivan. “But Mattie’s easy to get along with. And he’s very useful—an incredible thief and a lot of connections. Criminal connections, Ida, not terrorist.”
“I hadn’t even asked,” Ida said.
“I could see that look in your eyes,” said Ivan. “You were going to. Mattie doesn’t have any terrorist connections, just a hell of a lot of criminal ones.”
“Why wouldn’t he? It seems like terrorists could be useful people to know, if not to work with.”
“You would think that,” Ivan said drily. “No. Mattie likes having fun. He likes taking a risk and getting out of it with his own skill. Terrorists aren’t fun. And Mattie is easygoing. He doesn’t have the kind of single-minded commitment to live for a cause like that. Besides,” he concluded with what seemed like genuine feeling, “terrorists kill, and Mattie’s not a murderer.”
It was curious of him to forget, given that he was the one who had told Ida about it.
“What about the Jason?” Ida asked, and watched his reaction closely.
It gave him pause, at least.
“That was different,” Ivan said. “Mattie’s life was in danger.”
“From the entire crew?” Ida asked, amused. “You don’t think perhaps he might have stopped at one? Or two? Or three, or four? He needed to kill all sixty?”
“He was injured and alone,” said Ivan. “He had one chance to escape, and it involved killing them all. He shut off the life support on most of the ship. Tell me, how was he supposed to instruct the vacuum to pick and choose?”
Ivan was very serious. He meant it, Ida thought; he really meant it. Ida wondered how he had reconciled that protective loyalty with his decision to abandon Mattie in the first place.
“What do you have in common?” she asked with genuine curiosity. “A rich boy from Earth who ran away and a poor boy from Miranda?”
Ivan said, “Companionship.”
“Not a shared cause?” asked Ida.
Ivan looked exasperated. “No.”
“You’re very certain.”
“We spend almost every minute of our time together,” said Ivan. “I know what he does and doesn’t do, who he knows and doesn’t know.”
“And you’re never separated,” said Ida.
“Except when we have to be for a job, or for a few hours for our sanity.”
“And yet he left you now,” said Ida.
Ivan swallowed. He said, “After the Jason and Europa—”
“Europa was eight years ago,” Ida pointed out. “Surely the two of you—”
“Europa established boundaries,” Ivan said, each word snapping out precise, heavily Terran. “Help each other when we can, but otherwise each puts himself first.”
There was a logic to it that appealed to Ida. If she ever were to spend ten years of her life with someone, she would like to have the same rule established between them. But other people were not like her. Other people were weak, even Ivan. And she doubted that Matthew Gale had run because of a betrayal nearly a decade old that he seemed to have forgiven already, shortly after it happened, as he had returned to working with Ivan.
“That seems rather cold to me,” said Ida, “for someone as friendly as Matthew Gale.” Ivan made a face at the word “friendly,” but Ida did not take it back. “Perhaps he left you because he had something better to do.”
“Yeah,” said Ivan. “Live.”
“Or perhaps he had better secrets to hide.”
Ivan gave her a long, cold look, and this time did not deign to answer.
Ida started to pace again behind the bars of her long-unused chair, listening to the sound of her heels ringing out throughout the room. “Tell me more about Mattie’s connections.”
“Since they’re not relevant,” Ivan said, “I’d rather not turn a rat.”
“You are a rat,” Ida said. “You and Gale both. You betrayed each other. I want to know about your connections. Did you often get jobs through Mattie’s friends?”
“Sometimes,” said Ivan.
“Abigail was one of them.”
“Yes, she was.”
“What about your connections?” Ida asked. “Did you have any connections Mattie didn’t?”
Ivan looked away. She watched him as he seemed to struggle for a moment.
“Abby,” he said finally.
“What?” Ida asked, coming closer.
He rested his hands on the very edge of the table. “After a time, Abby became my contact, not Mattie’s.”
“But she was Mattie’s foster sister.”
“When she was eight,” said Ivan.
“I thought you hated her.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Ida looked down at him, his chains stretched to the limit so that he could grip the edge of the table, and wondered why he would tell her such a thing.
“Were you sleeping with her?” she asked.
A pause. “Obviously,” he said.
Not obviously, though Ida saw the signs now. She suspected the real reason for his confession was to separate Mattie from Abigail. Interesting indeed.
“Does Mattie have any connections that you don’t know about?” she asked.
Ivan all but rolled his eyes. “Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”
“I mean that he doesn’t let you meet,” Ida said. “That he doesn’t know you know about. Anyone he is hiding.”
Ivan leaned in toward her, as close as he could get. He said, “No.”
“Could he be keeping any secrets like that?”
“No,” said Ivan.
“I want you to give me a list of all of Mattie’s most important connections,” Ida said.
“I can’t do that.”
“Yes, you can, and you will,” she said, “because you have to.”
Ivan took in a deep breath.
“I don’t know their last names,” he said.
“Is that a lie?”
“It’s the truth,” he snapped.
Ida, slow and deliberate, said, “Names.”
“Adina,” said Ivan. “River. Charles. Nora. Ling. Farrah.”
“Is that all?” She knew most of those names; some of them were currently in System custody.
“Anji, Christoph, Abby. How far do you want me to go?” Ivan snapped. “Do you want me to name every criminal in the outer planets?”
“Does he know every criminal?”
“He knows a damn lot of them,” Ivan said.
“What is he to you?” Ida asked, keeping him on edge, unsteady. “Matthew Gale. Is he your coworker? Your friend? Your lover? Brother? Little brother? Tell me, what is he to you?”
“He’s Mattie,” Ivan said.
Little brother, perhaps, Ida thought. Ivan was protective of him the way he hadn’t been of Constance Harper.
But then again, perhaps not.
“You realize that he’s dead, do you not?” she asked, and Ivan looked away. She watched a muscle in his jaw tighten. “The escape pod he abandoned you in has no form of propulsion, and he was aimed nowhere in particular. There was no one around to pick up his pod. He is dead by now, dead for a week, suffocated or starved.”
Ivan would not look at her.
“There’s no need to protect him,” Ida said. “He is dead.”
“I’m not protecting anyone,” said Ivan.
“I think you are,” said Ida. “You have been connected to the Mallt-y-Nos. That means that Matthew Gale has been connected to the Mallt-y-Nos. The two of you do, after all, go everywhere together. The connection is undeniable. But if you are telling the truth and you have no connection to her, then that means that Mattie must—”
“We do not have any connection to the Mallt-y-Nos!” said Ivan. He was looking at her again now, glaring, his fingers clenched bloodless on the edge of the table. “Is it so impossible to you that for once you might be wrong?”
Ida smiled and leaned in closer, just out of reach of his chained arms.
“You’re singing a different tune now than you were before,” she said. “You said it yourself: I am the woman who is never wrong.”
He looked up at her without speaking, breathing with such evenness in and out through his nose that it had to be deliberate. She cherished it, his tension. He was strung so tightly that she could almost feel it in the air she inhaled; it was like running her tongue over the tautness of a harp string.
She was about to speak, ready to speak, ready to turn the subject to the last of Ivan’s friends, the one she had been waiting to ask about all this time, the one she knew he knew she would ask about next, the best lead that she had: Abigail Hunter.
The name was on her tongue, Ivan’s eyes were fixed on her face, and then someone knocked at the door.
She didn’t believe it at first, too caught up in this moment of her interrogation to comprehend that someone could dare to interrupt her.
The knock came again. She straightened slowly, holding Ivan’s gaze, and just as she broke it, the knock came a third time, a little more insistently, as if the knocker thought she might not have heard.
She crossed the white room and went to the door. When she opened it, Gagnon stood there with one hand upraised, as if he had just been debating whether he should knock once more.
“Yes?” she said pleasantly, but he looked as wary as if she had raised her hand for a blow. His eyes were shadowed, his clothes rumpled, his cheeks unshaven, and it was plain he had been roused recently from sleep. She felt a surge of contempt for him.
“Captain Domitian needs to speak to you,” he said.
“It’s urgent?” Ida asked with a delicate and unmistakable threat in the word.
“Yes, ma’am. He’s in the piloting room.”
She held up one finger to him, and he stood still and silent while she turned back around and walked back to Ivan, who was sitting tense and alone. She and Gagnon had been speaking too softly for him to hear.
When she came up behind him, she laid a hand very lightly on his shoulder. Beneath her fingers, she felt the hardness of his tensed muscles, the bow of his collarbone. It was the first time she had touched him. He did not look to her.
“Pardon me,” she said softly. “We’ll continue this conversation shortly.”
He said nothing and did not look at her as she walked away.
When she passed Gagnon in the doorway again, she said, “Watch him. Do not leave this room. Do not speak to him. I will be back.”
Ida strode toward the piloting room with all the dire tension of her interrupted interrogation still shaking in her hands. She was annoyed at the interruption but not furious. Ivan was in a precarious state, and leaving him to stew and to stress, going over in his head obsessively how he next would lie, might work to her advantage.
When Ida reached the piloting room, she found that Domitian was not alone. The mechanic, with her curly hair affray, was pacing in the narrow space of the piloting room when Ida arrived. She stopped once Ida entered, turning her wide brown eyes on her. There were shadows beneath them. It was no wonder the Ananke was not fixed, Ida thought, if the mechanic refused to sleep.
“You wished to speak to me?” Ida said, dismissing the mechanic to address Domitian, who was standing beside the door as if he had been waiting for her to arrive.
“Doctor Bastet has information,” said Domitian with a nod at the mechanic. Ida, with thin patience, turned to face the other woman.
She was still watching Ida with those round brown eyes. “I got into the Annwn,” said Althea Bastet.
The frisson of annoyance that had entered Ida’s breast at the thought of having to interact with Althea vanished immediately. This was far better news than she had expected, and she was pleased that the mechanic had finally taken it on herself to obey Ida’s orders, though she hardly understood why it had been necessary to interrupt the interrogation to inform her. “What did you find?”
“Not all the way,” Althea amended. “Just a little bit. I don’t think it’s possible to get farther in, not without putting the whole ship at risk.” Ida gritted her teeth; phrased that way, the System would be certain not to approve any further investigation into the Annwn. The safety of the Ananke was above all most important to the System.
“But I did,” said Althea, “manage to find their…stash of useful programs.”
“What was there?”
“Some viruses,” said Althea. The lights of the control panel behind her flashed on and off in patterns Ida lacked the ability to recognize. “Not much useful, but there were some things. One”—she took a breath; the girl was nervous, Ida saw, anxious and on edge for no reason that she could see—“was a program for the detonation of a sequence of bombs.”
Ida nearly smiled, that flush of near triumph she had felt when Ivan had slipped earlier that day coming back to fill her hollow chest. The Mallt-y-Nos was a bomber. And here Ivanov had connected himself to her favorite weapon. “What kind of bombs?”
“I don’t know—”
“Doctor Bastet, this is very important,” said Ida. If she could only connect Ivan explicitly to the missing Class 1s, she would have him and have reason to use the Aletheia. “Tell me, what kind of bombs?”
“I don’t know.” Althea’s hand had fallen onto the back of the piloting chair; her fingers were digging into its gray fabric. She was so tense, and Ida could hardly understand why.
“Then give me a size. Large or small?”
Althea looked behind Ida, presumably at Domitian. “Don’t look at him, look at me,” Ida said. “Tell me what kind of bombs.”
“There’s no way to tell,” said Althea.
“Surely you can tell me, large or small.” Ida was growing frustrated.
“I can’t!”
“You can tell me nothing at all about the type of bombs this program is designed to detonate?”
“No, just that it detonates them in sequence or all at once—it’s a timing mechanism basically, but more advanced—”
“So this program,” Ida interrupted, “could apply to a sequence of small explosives such as the kind used by thieves like Ivanov and Gale to open locked doors?” The two had used that very tactic many times before to get into and out of secured System locations.
“Yes, but—”
“Then I thank you for your assistance in this matter,” said Ida, and could not stop herself from using a tone that said the opposite. If the program had such a simple explanation, the information was useless to her and the interruption to her work unnecessary. “Write up a report and send it to myself and the System, and you may return to repairing the Ananke.”
Althea Bastet took a deep breath. “It could be used to detonate bombs on the Ananke,” she said.
Of course. Ida understood now the reason for Althea’s anxiety. She was afraid for her ship. It was a silly, stupid fear; there was no reason to think that the Ananke was in danger, and Ida very much doubted that if the ship had been wired to explode, someone on the crew would not have noticed by now. “And have any of the many sweeps of the Ananke performed by yourself, the computer, and the rest of the crew located any bombs or signs of bombs?” she said with deliberate patience.
“No,” Althea admitted.
“And did Gale have sufficient time while on board to plant a series of bombs on the Ananke?”
“No, but—”
“Then I suggest,” said Ida, “that it cease to concern you.” The mechanic still looked nervous, so Ida added, vaguely irritated but wishing to end Althea’s anxiety before it could grow and become an issue, “In a few days’ time I will take Ivanov off ship. You will not have to trouble yourself with this affair again.”
Althea’s chin tipped up. Whatever was troubling her, Ida’s words had seemed only to increase it: Althea’s hand was shaking, trembling nervously in steady rhythm against the piloting chair. “There was something else,” Althea said. “There was another program on there. Most of the programs were viruses, but there was the bombs one, and there was this one. This one was—it made it so that whatever computer had it installed would react to the appearance of certain people. It would recognize them and do something about it.”
Ida frowned, an ominous suspicion growing in her mind about where Althea was going with this.
Althea said, “I know for a fact that that program was in my—was in this ship. That’s how Gale and Ivanov got on board. And I keep finding traces of that same program still—it keeps showing up in the errors in the camera programs. Until I can wipe it out completely, it’s still possible that there might be consequences for taking Ivanov off ship. I don’t know what kind of consequences; it could be anything. It could be more sabotage. Gale could have programmed the ship so that if we ever killed Ivanov, the ship would destroy itself.”
“Revenge from beyond the grave?” Ida asked drily. The mechanic was letting her fancy get the better of her. “What are you saying, Doctor Bastet?”
“You can’t take Ivanov off this ship.”
Ida said, “I beg your pardon.”
It had sounded for a moment as if Althea had tried to give her an order.
Althea was leaning more heavily on the pilot’s chair, and somehow, without either of them moving, she seemed to give the impression of having been backed into a corner. The room was small, Ida knew, and the force and strength of her unspoken anger had filled it and driven Althea back.
“I think it’s too dangerous,” Althea began, but Ida interrupted her swiftly.
“I decide what is best for the prisoner. You were not presuming to tell me, your superior, how best to manage the prisoner under my care?”
“No, I—”
“Then I will expect you will not try to do so again,” Ida said. “Write your report on your findings on the Annwn and deliver it to me. Then return to your job and repair this ship.”
Althea looked beaten back and beaten down, and Ida almost turned to leave, successful at stamping out the mechanic’s useless grab for control, but then Althea Bastet straightened her back and a determined look settled in place on her heart-shaped face. It was unexpected, as if the mechanic had a spine Ida had failed to recognize before, and Ida watched her with narrowed eyes. Althea said, “I’m not acting out of my authority.”
Ida raised an eyebrow and prepared to beat the mechanic down again, this time for good.
But Althea wasn’t done. “The facial recognition program means that there could be hidden viruses in the Ananke that Ivanov is affecting in ways that we don’t understand. The only thing we can do until I can fix the computer is to keep the ship in the same state it is now and to not make any changes.”
Ida tilted her head, daring Althea with her eyes to finish her thought.
The mechanic dared. “Until I finish repairing the Ananke,” she said with only the slightest tremor of nerves in her voice, “for the safety of this ship, you cannot take Ivanov off board.”
Ida returned to the interrogation room with fury boiling under her skin and sharpening her movements. Gagnon was standing just inside the room, arms folded, watching the back of Ivan’s neck. Ida dismissed him with a sharp cut of her hand, and he left swiftly.
Back inside the room, with just herself and Ivanov, she tried to center herself. This was what Ida had been building to throughout that long day of interrogation; this was what she wanted to know. Milla Ivanov, Constance Harper, Matthew Gale; all were of only tangential interest to her. But Abigail Hunter: there was a lead. Ivan knew it, too. Ida was certain. She had a clear goal, and she had only to reach for it.
But when Ida tried to reach for calm, she found only the image of the little mechanic standing in the piloting room, frightened but daring to defy her, and succeeding. She found only the knowledge that she had been confronted and had lost to the most insignificant member of the crew, wielding her petty power with all the stupidity of a child.
Time was of the essence. She could not stand just inside the doorway of the room and fume all day. “Let’s talk about Abigail Hunter,” she said to Ivan as she strode into his line of sight, her heels ringing out with savage sharpness against the paneled floor. He looked at her warily.
She could not show weakness, not here and not to him.
“How did you meet Abby?” she asked.
“Accidentally,” Ivan said. His answer was as swift and short as her question had been. He was picking up on her mood and responding accordingly.
“On her part or yours?”
“On Mattie’s.”
“Explain,” Ida said.
“Mattie took me to meet Constance a little over seven years ago. After we left her bar, we went elsewhere on Mars to refuel and restock our supplies. Abby found us there.”
“And your first meeting?” Ida said. “What was that like?”
“Unfriendly,” said Ivan, “with an edge of violence. You’re out of sorts, Ida. What happened to you?”
“Answer the question, Ivan,” Ida said with all the deadly sweetness she possessed.
“I was buying provisions, minding my own business. Mattie had gone elsewhere to get something else; negotiate for fuel, I think. Then Abby came up beside me and said, ‘So you’re the one who nearly got my brother killed.’ ”
“Referring to Europa.” The significance of seven years and change had not escaped her.
“Referring to half a dozen things,” Ivan said. “Including the Jason. I didn’t know who she was, of course, so I stalled for time. She wasn’t System, that was obvious, but I knew that she was dangerous. What did happen to you? Tell me, I’m curious.”
“Whatever may or may not have happened to me is not your concern,” Ida said. “We are here to talk about you. When Abigail confronted you, what did you do?”
“I asked her what she meant while I reached for my knife. She saw me going for the knife and told me I didn’t want to do that. I told her I thought I did. Mattie saw us then and came over, grabbing my wrist so I couldn’t finish drawing the knife. He told me who she was. She’d already heard about me.”
“Where did this take place?” Ida asked. She had not seen the footage of this meeting, which meant the System hadn’t flagged it. Perhaps it was part of some surveillance that hadn’t been watched yet. That she had never even heard of the encounter—from surveillance or rumor—only increased her simmering frustration.
Ivan had the nerve to smirk. “It was in a traveling black market. No cameras, no regular location. There’s no surveillance footage of this meeting. Abby’s more paranoid about cameras than anyone else I know.”
Useless. Another dead end on Abigail Hunter. “Mattie told her about you but not you about her?” Ida asked.
“That’s right. I think he was waiting to introduce us.”
“Why?”
“Abby’s the black sheep,” Ivan said after the slightest hesitation. “She completely embraced the criminal world, just like Constance keeps herself well out of it. Connie doesn’t like her; the two haven’t spoken to each other or communicated at all in years.”
“Mattie also lives a life of crime,” Ida pointed out. “As do you. I don’t think even you could deny that.” She smiled at him, and he mimicked her. She wondered if there was that much unpleasantness in her smile or if he had added that on his own. “So why would Mattie be shy about introducing Abigail to you because of the life she leads?”
“Abby’s embraced it more,” Ivan said. “We steal for ourselves. Abby connects criminals. There’s a difference.”
“One I’m failing to appreciate.”
Ivan sighed. “As a necessary part of her job, Abby works with people more dangerous than we do. She has to make nice with them.”
Ida gave him a look. Ivan returned it. She said, “Dangerous people. Like terrorists?”
“I meant more like hit men and people involved in organized crime,” Ivan said with very weary patience. “But I don’t ask. I told you before. Abby works for money, not ideals. If she has any terrorist connections, they keep her well out of the loop.”
“But you can’t deny that she might have some.”
“I can’t,” Ivan admitted.
And with that confirmation, Ida could certainly present the System with a plan to intensify the manhunt for Abigail Hunter. It was not proof enough to convince the System that she had been right all along, but it was something, at least. She had achieved at least one small thing today. Unbidden, she thought again of the mechanic, Althea Bastet, defying her.
“Someone disobeyed you,” Ivan guessed. He was watching her face closely. The faintest of smirks, insolent and nearly invisible, lingered on his lips. “Just now. That’s why you’re off your game. You seem like the kind of person who wouldn’t take it well when other people don’t do what you want.”
Ida looked at him coldly. She was not off her game no matter how unnerving it was that Ivan had guessed so accurately what had gone wrong for her. That was what he did, she reminded herself. He read people.
“Tell me about the fire,” she said.
Ivan lifted his brows. He hated her, he loathed her. She could see it in his faint and mocking smile. The sight of his loathing sharpened her intent, made it easier for her to turn her wrath against Althea into a weapon to be used against him.
Ida said, “Tell me about the fire when Mattie, Constance, and Abigail were children. The last time Abigail was a law-abiding part of the System.” The last time there was ever concrete surveillance footage of her. The story was an old one, but in its context it was of interest to Ida.
“I don’t know a whole lot about it,” Ivan said. “I wasn’t there. I was in kindergarten. Twenty AU away.”
“You must have heard about it,” Ida said. She had regained enough of her control to sit down at last in her long-abandoned chair, laying her arms on the rests and feeling herself in a position of power. “You’re intimate with all three survivors.”
“I haven’t asked Abby about it,” Ivan said. “Constance won’t talk about it. Mattie only gave me the short story.”
“I want to know anyway,” Ida said.
Ivan leaned back in his chair, mimicking her posture. Ida wondered if he was even conscious he was doing it. The hours of interrogation were starting to show on his face, in the rhythmless pattering of his right hand.
“Fine,” he said. “Once upon a time, there were three little children.”
Condescension. Ida could not stop the way her jaw set itself, but she let him continue.
“There was Constance, the eldest, practical and sensible. Abby, the middle child, restless and angry. And Mattie, the youngest, playful and clever.” Ivan’s sarcasm was starting to fade into a different cadence, the true cadence of a fairy tale. “Mattie’s parents were only teenagers when they had him; that was why the System took him away. Constance’s mother didn’t have a husband or a partner willing to help her raise her daughter; that’s why the System took her away. Abigail—I don’t know why they took Abigail away from home.
“These three little children met on Miranda, in the house of a System administrator who fostered children not because he wanted to but because ostentatiously doing so made it more likely he would be promoted off of the icy little moon. He and his wife didn’t like children, and they didn’t want them. They especially didn’t like Mattie.”
Absent its mockery, the story, along with the way it was told, was somehow fascinating, and Ida was reminded all over again that Leontios Ivanov was a dangerous man.
“Little Mattie had quick fingers and bad compulsions. One day they thought he had stolen something from them—a piece of jewelry, maybe—and maybe he had. Mattie doesn’t remember anymore. They were very angry.”
He paused, and in his silence Ida read between the lines how the System administrators had expressed their anger.
“Constance took Mattie out of the house and hid him in the nearby quarries while Abby distracted the System. Constance went back for their sister, leaving Mattie to hide in the quarries. And so he hid. But when Connie made it back to the house, the house was ablaze. It burned hot enough to destroy the house and the bodies inside completely so that nothing was left of anything but unidentifiable ashes.”
“Arson,” Ida said.
“Arson,” Ivan confirmed.
Ida leaned forward slightly. “With rocket fuel,” she told him. The investigation had been positive on that front.
Ivan took a deep breath. “With rocket fuel,” he agreed. “Abby left the foster system after that. Constance and Mattie stayed in it and stayed together, and from what I heard, every other place where they were fostered was kind and loving. But Abby never came back. And Constance hasn’t spoken to Abby since.”
“Abby set the fire,” said Ida.
“Yes,” Ivan said.
“So what you’re telling me,” said Ida, and leaned her elbows onto the table, “is that Abigail Hunter has reason to hate the System, killed two people at the age of nine, enjoys setting fires—”
“Enjoys?”
“—and certainly has terrorist connections,” Ida finished.
Ivan said, slipping back into the precise, hard enunciation he seemed to adopt when frustrated, “The way you’ve organized the information, Ida, leadingly, I see what you’re driving at, but you know what I think?”
“Tell me,” Ida said. “I’ve been wondering.”
Ivan could not get his elbows up on the table because of the chains, but he leaned forward anyway. The shadow of that mocking smile was back on his lips. “I think,” he said, “that you’re looking for a particular answer—that I have a connection, direct or otherwise, to the Mallt-y-Nos—and you’re finding that answer even where it is not.”
Her fury again, her fury at her failure, at the threat of more failure, at Althea Bastet defying her and Ivan defying her as well, rose up in her chest. She would find a way to break him. She would have to find a way to break him. And she would break him.
“Where is Abby now, Ivan?” Ida asked, her voice soft, just loud enough to travel across the short space separating them.
“I don’t know,” Ivan said in a voice just as soft, their whispered conversation seeming even quieter in the vast empty space of the white room. “I never know. Mattie and I don’t find Abigail; she finds us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Ivan, “that Abby doesn’t let anyone know where she is, and I have no way to contact her. She’s a ghost, Ida. Everywhere and nowhere at once. You will never find her.”
“Don’t antagonize her,” Domitian said after Ida had gone.
“I wasn’t antagonizing her,” said Althea. She was already rattled from the furious way Ida had looked at her; to have Domitian warning her about her behavior added another level of uncertainty and fear.
Domitian did not reply to her defensive retort. Instead, he said, “I’m going to arrange for you and Gagnon to have shortened sleep shifts.”
“What? Why?”
“Because of what you just explained to Miss Stays. If it’s possible that Ivanov might be able to influence the computer without us knowing, it’s even more important that the ship be repaired swiftly. I can’t help you”—Althea thought she heard a trace of frustration in his tone—“but Gagnon can. I want the two of you working without pause on this machine. I want it fixed.”
“I have been working on her nonstop,” Althea said.
This time, when he looked at her, she could see the frustration clearly. “Then explain to me what you need me to do to help, Althea,” he said. “I want this ship fixed.”
On very rare occasions Althea found the good sense to know when to shut up. “Longer shifts will help,” she said. He glanced at her dolefully as if he knew she was humoring him, but he nodded.
“I’m going to go work on her now,” Althea said. She wanted little more than to be out of the piloting room, which still somehow seemed to hold the oppressive presence of Ida Stays even though she had left. Althea hardly waited for Domitian’s acknowledging nod to escape.
Ida’s interrogation would end soon, and so Althea went straight for the computer terminal outside Ivanov’s cell. She would be guarding him again.
Once she got there, she found a message waiting for her from Gagnon.
“u conspire against my sleep,” it said, and concluded with “:(”
Twelve years of upper-level education, two doctorates, and a high-ranking System research position. Althea had witnessed Gagnon’s elegant theories, his brilliance with mathematics. Yet he could not obey simple rules of spelling and grammar. Althea shook her head at him, though he could not see her. “Yes,” she replied, then added for good measure, “>:)”
A moment later she relented. “Go to bed,” she typed, and sent it.
Gagnon replied in short order: “promise u won’t wake me up again”
“Cross my heart,” Althea answered, and that was the end of it.
Domitian led Ivanov back to his cell perhaps an hour later. Althea had little desire to interact with him that night, and it seemed Ivanov felt the same, because he did not bother her while she sat there and worked. She wondered if he had been able to fall asleep but dismissed the thought with some annoyance.
Some hours later she got the message.
She was back to the robotic arms, trying to trace the origin of the malfunction in them. Several times she thought she caught tantalizing hints of what had gone wrong, only to follow them into nothing, bits of junk code, false leads. At first she was annoyed when the message appeared: being a System priority message, it automatically took up half the screen, banishing her workspace to a narrow area that made it nearly impossible to see what she was trying to do. She lost her place in the lines of code. But when she read the message the System had sent, for the first time since Ivanov and Gale had come on board, the Ananke was banished from her thoughts.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
Rustling from the room behind her. “What is it?” Ivanov asked. It seemed he had not been asleep.
Althea could scarcely believe what she was reading. And so, when Ivan said again, “Althea. What happened?” she answered without thinking.
“Titania is in rebellion,” she said. “The System says it’s being led by the Mallt-y-Nos.”
Ida was woken from a dead sleep by pounding on her door.
For a moment, in the space between sleep and waking, memory of the knock on the door to the white room that had interrupted her session with Ivan overlapped with the sound of the door being pounded on now, and she was caught up in her old annoyance and a strange and dreadful anticipation of failure.
She rose from her bed, shaking off her sleep and her confusion, and answered the door disheveled. “What is it?” she demanded when she opened it and found Domitian standing there.
He blinked at her. She was wearing nothing but the long shirt she wore to bed, but she did not have patience for his reaction. Before she could prompt him again, he said, “There’s been an attack on Titania by the Mallt-y-Nos.”
She immediately left the door to stride over to the computer terminal embedded in the wall, which was wedged awkwardly up against one of the oddly shaped room’s unexpected corners. A touch of her finger woke the screen, and immediately a message from the System appeared.
Titania was in open rebellion.
For a moment Ida could do no more than try to absorb that one of Uranus’s moons had rebelled against the System. It was disastrous. It was infuriating. The System, she knew, would quash it, and easily. Titania was but one moon. But what was troubling was not that it might succeed but that it had happened at all.
The System had also sent to her the surveillance footage on account of her rank in the intelligence branch. Ida let it play and watched as a crowd of people, native Titanians from the look of them, advanced on a System building ringed with System military. There was no sound to the footage, and Ida watched their mouths move noiselessly, their faces twisted in rage without voice. As she watched, one of them threw a bottle with a rag stuffed into it at the building or at the standing soldiers. It shattered and sent liquid fire crawling up the System soldiers, up the walls of the System building. A Molotov cocktail. The System soldiers raised their rifles. The unarmed crowd recoiled as the System fired into them, screaming without sound on the silent tape.
When Ida broke her attention away from the surveillance tape, leaving it still playing on one side of the screen, and looked at the rest of the message, there was another surprise awaiting her. At the very moment rebel forces had attacked System strongholds all over the moon, it seemed, a message had been broadcast out to the entire solar system. It had been broadcast on all frequencies, including System ones. Everyone in the Uranian system had heard. No doubt the message had traveled all the way to Neptune and the dwarf planets as well. Perhaps it had even made it to Jupiter.
The message had said, THE WILD HUNT BEGINS.
It had been signed “The Mallt-y-Nos.”
Ida supposed that most people would feel horror, or fear, or dread. She felt only the start of exultation. The stakes had risen for her, for the System, but with the rising of the stakes had come opportunity.
Domitian was still standing in the doorway. “Come in and close the door,” she ordered, and he obeyed while her mind raced.
It would put Ida’s head on the block even more if she was wrong, but she knew that she was never wrong. What was a little more risk when her success was certain?
What was a little more risk to prove herself? What was a little more risk to win?
She wondered if Ivan had known this attack would come. She wondered if he had sat across from her, and looked at her with those blue eyes open and innocent, and known all the time, counting down in his head the days until this began.
“This changes things,” Ida said, and heard her voice sound as calm as she herself was not.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Domitian.
She doubted that he understood the half of it. If the Mallt-y-Nos had struck her first blow, the System would be ready for war. Already their message said that they were deploying the full force of their military to the outer planets to quell Titania and to defend against further uprisings or whatever else the Mallt-y-Nos might have planned. But it wouldn’t be enough. They’d be ready to take more risks in return for something to use against the Mallt-y-Nos. Ida did not doubt that the System would be willing to risk the Ananke’s secrecy for its own security.
“I was going to take Ivanov off the Ananke for purposes that are absolutely necessary to my interrogation,” Ida said. “This has made it all the more imperative that I break him. And yet I cannot take him from this ship.”
“Miss Stays, Doctor Bastet…”
“Is no doubt correct in what she does,” Ida said sweetly. She could be magnanimous now, when she was about to get what she wanted. “Don’t mistake me. I am only saying that if I cannot take him off the ship, it makes sense to bring my work here.”
A pause. Perhaps Domitian was waiting for her to elaborate. Ida wanted him to ask.
“How so, Miss Stays?” Domitian asked.
“I was going to interrogate Constance Harper and Milla Ivanov,” said Ida. She would have liked to speak to Gale and Hunter, but Gale was dead and Hunter missing. Harper and Doctor Ivanov, though, were in her grasp.
On the screen before her was the surveillance footage from the surface of Titania, still playing. A System building was on fire. System soldiers were firing into the crowd. On the ground before the camera, a man had fallen to his knees, clutching at his chest.
“And if I cannot go to them,” Ida said, watching the man die, “then they will have to come to me.”