Physics, ground down to its most basic parts, was nothing more than the study of energy: where the energy was, where the energy was not, and how the energy flowed.
Humans were the same. All human interactions were nothing more than the flow of power from one to another. Whatever emotions other people professed to feel for one another—love, hate, empathy—they were nothing to that unconscious awareness of power. Crack any of those sentiments open and find inside only the dark core of a power differential informing it, defining it, giving it strength.
Ida could not say for certain if other people genuinely believed in their own honesty when they professed to be motivated by things other than power, if they simply didn’t recognize that every motivation led back to power in the end. Every interaction was built on power and ebbed and flowed with the changes in who had the power and who did not. She could not say for certain, and there was no way to find out safely.
One thing she did know for certain: she recognized it, she knew it, and that by itself gave her power.
“There was violence on Titania last night,” she said to Ivan when they were together in the white room, and he thought he could gain power over her by the skill with which he lied. “Did you hear?”
He looked up at her and shrugged. “Should I have?” he asked.
“It was just a question,” Ida said with a smile.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Ida, but I’ve been in a cell for a week. I’m a little behind on the news.”
“The Mallt-y-Nos has claimed the activity,” said Ida. “Are you sure you haven’t heard?”
Ivan said, “I hadn’t heard.”
“But you don’t seem surprised.”
He smiled that wolfish smile. “There’s always violence on Titania. Should I be shocked that there’s a little more?”
“What’s she up to, Ivan?” Ida asked. “What’s she going to do next?”
He shrugged as if he couldn’t possibly care. “You can ask me that question as often as you like,” he said. “I still won’t be able to answer it.”
Ida studied him, the arrogance in the way he leaned back in his chair and looked her straight in the eye and boldly spoke what they both knew were lies.
“We found an interesting program on board your ship,” she said. “It looks like a program that would detonate a sequence of charges. Or bombs, perhaps.”
“That?” he said, one eyebrow lifting, displaying no surprise or alarm at the mention of his ship. “We use that to blow up vault doors from far away so that we’re outside of the blast radius. Surely you’ve seen the footage.”
He was so calm and collected, he thought he was winning. Ida knew better. And the ship’s mechanic who thought she could have her way over Ida’s will—she, too, did not fully realize how complete Ida’s power was. Because that evening, after the interrogation, Ida received a message from the System: her request for permission to have Constance Harper and Milla Ivanov brought to the Ananke had been granted.
By tomorrow, the two women would be on board.
Althea found out that Harper and the doctor would be coming on board only hours before they were scheduled to arrive.
“But they can’t,” she said to Domitian when he broke the news. “This ship is secret, the technology is classified. If it leaked…”
“It will not leak,” Domitian interrupted, so solid and firm that it was as if she had run up against a stone wall. “The location of the Ananke is being sent directly into their flight computers and then erased entirely once they have returned to their original location. They will not be able to find the ship again themselves or direct anyone else to see it. Their interaction with the ship will be limited to empty rooms, Althea.”
“They’ll still see the Ananke,” said Althea. “They’ll still see the halls, the computer interface, the shape of her…”
Domitian sighed. Althea sensed she was nearing the edge of his indulgence for her, but she pushed on.
“Milla Ivanov is a scientist,” Althea said. “She’ll be able to just look at this ship and know a lot about it. That it’s mass-based gravitation. That the computer is unusual—”
“We have permission from the System,” Domitian said. “If anything happens, which it won’t, you will not be liable.”
Prison had been the least of Althea’s concerns. “But—”
“Milla Ivanov will arrive first,” he said. “I will take Ivanov into the white room and wait while Miss Stays interrogates Doctor Ivanov in the uppermost empty storage room. She will then be brought to see her son in the white room, and then she will leave. Miss Harper will arrive shortly thereafter and go through the same process. They will see no more of the ship than two empty rooms, the docking bay, and a small segment of the hallway.”
“But they’ll still see her,” Althea said, and could not quite understand why he did not see the problem.
Ida Stays, she suspected. It was Ida Stays who had stopped him from understanding.
“That’s enough,” Domitian said. “I realize that you are concerned, but Miss Stays has received System permission, and she has received mine. Ivanov is not leaving this ship, which is what you wanted. This interrogation is crucial to the System, especially after the events on Titania. Regarding her presence here, Miss Stays has been very accommodating. You have expressed your concerns and they have been noted, and I suggest that now you remember your place on board this ship.”
Althea was caught short again, baffled. It sounded almost as if he had threatened her with insubordination, a serious charge on a secret military craft. She could hardly believe he would ever threaten her at all.
She nodded her acquiescence without another word and started off down the hall.
“Althea?” Domitian called, and unwillingly, feeling like a dog called to heel, she stopped, obedient even after a scolding.
“Ivanov must not know that they’re coming,” he said, and Althea nodded her understanding without turning around, wanting only to be gone. She was supposed to relieve Gagnon in front of Ivanov’s cell.
Gagnon’s eyes were shadowed, like hers, with too little sleep. Althea still did not know what her expression must have looked like, but it made him snort and say, “Right there with you, Al,” as if they were conspirators in sentiment. Althea did not rise to the comment, and Gagnon let the conversation die. Instead of speaking, he rose from her stool and clapped her on the shoulder as he passed.
“I’ll relieve you in a few hours,” he said.
Althea’s voice sounded robotic in her ears. “Your sleep shift is next,” she said.
“Yeah,” Gagnon said, walking backward up the hall, “but you need sleep even more than me.”
Althea stood in place after he was gone, unmoving. She could not quite bring herself to move forward and start to work again on the Ananke. Behind her, in the silence, she almost imagined she could feel Ivanov’s presence, like the warmth of someone standing close at her back or the soft sound of breaths in an empty room. It was strange and disconcerting and filled her with a curious uncomfortable feeling that was not dissimilar to guilt. His mother and his friend would be coming here later on, and Althea knew it, but he didn’t. She knew that Ida would have interrogated them whether or not Althea had forced her to keep Ivanov on board, but she still felt a strange responsibility for the way things had fallen out.
She sat down slowly on her stool. She was under orders not to tell him, and so she wouldn’t. The System did not look kindly on insubordination. It was the first step on the path that led to the kind of thing that had gotten Saturn destroyed.
Into the silence, not so much breaking it as filling it, like color diffusing into water, Ivanov said, “I guess no one’s getting enough sleep around here.”
“You should be,” Althea said. “You don’t have anything to do.” She spoke automatically and without real rancor.
“And you have too much.”
The Ananke, the Annwn—Althea did have too much to do. And she had too many thoughts choking her brain.
“What do you think about,” she asked out of nothing but blank, honest curiosity and the awareness that Ida Stays was making both of them suffer, “when you’re in there, not sleeping?”
“I think about a lot of things.” It was a dishonest answer, and Althea sighed and turned back to her computer, cutting him off with the angle of her shoulders though he could not see the motion, but he continued, “I think about my friends. I think about my home planet.”
“Earth.” It was strange to her sometimes how even though he had left Earth, he had never stopped being from it. It made him seem very ordinary to her, very much like the people she had known there and very little like someone she should fear.
“Yes.” This silence was almost comfortable.
“You’re not from Earth,” Ivanov said, as naturally as anything. “But you’ve spent some time there. Did you go to school?”
“Australian branch of the Terran University.” It could not be dangerous to tell him something as simple and public as that.
“I went to the North American branch,” he said. “We kicked your ass at hockey.”
That hit at a nerve and brought bright loud memories of standing on bleachers screaming at the colored shapes running on the field below, letting herself get caught up in the crowd’s noise and energy despite not quite understanding, despite partly wishing she could simply go back to her dorm and put machines together untroubled. Ivanov was a little bit like that crowd, she thought. It was not like her to speak to him, but somehow she was caught up in it.
In any case, she could not resist saying, “But not at soccer.”
“Nobody cares about soccer.”
“Maybe the North American branch didn’t,” said Althea.
Ivanov laughed, his voice low. “When did you graduate?” he asked.
“Twelve years ago.”
“We overlapped,” he said. “I graduated ten years ago.”
Althea looked at the computer screen before her, which was still blank, and said, “I know.”
With the Ananke in its state, she had not had much time to wonder. Still, the stray thought had appeared to her whenever she was in a place where Ivanov wasn’t to wonder, Had she met him while she was there? Had she passed him on the street or in the quad during those rare times she visited the North American branch or whenever he went down to Australia? She thought she would have remembered him if she had, handsome and buttoned up and closed off, with brilliant blue eyes.
This conversation was a waste of her time. Althea opened up a program on the computer, intending to work, but the thought of Earth and the university brought to mind again Ivanov’s mother, who would be on board soon.
What would Ida Stays do to her? Althea wondered, and wished she had not the wit to wonder.
“But you’re not from Earth originally,” Ivanov commented. He spoke it so casually that it did not seem an insult, only the natural continuation of their conversation.
“I’m from Luna,” Althea said.
“Ah,” said Ivanov. “We were neighbors.”
She meant to ask him then what she had been wondering since she had read his file. She preferred things that way, to ask directly and immediately. She hated uncertainty. But somehow she could not ask about that time on the roof of his house. Perhaps it was because she had the knowledge of Milla Ivanov and Constance Harper sitting in her throat. Yet she could not bring herself to let the conversation die. “Have you ever been to Luna?”
“A true woman of the moon,” Ivanov said, and she knew he was smiling from his voice even when she couldn’t see him. “Won’t call it ‘the moon.’ ”
Althea scowled, an automatic reaction, even though he couldn’t see her.
“When I was very young,” he said in the slow, lilting cadence of a story, “my mother and I went there once or twice for a vacation. With the gravity so low, all the people move in slow motion. There’s something eerie about the shape of a woman against the blackness of space with her hair floating around her head, falling too slowly back to her shoulders to be natural, to be anything but a waking dream. My mother,” he said, and the thought of Milla Ivanov sent a bolt through Althea’s heart. “That’s all I really remember from going there with her. My mother under the atmospheric dome with her hair loose and drifting. I’m not sure it really happened. She never wears her hair down.”
“Where did you visit?” Althea asked to have something to say.
“Earth-facing side. Of course. Better developed. Better reception for the System’s cameras, that side.”
“I grew up on the space side,” Althea said. “It’s less touristy.”
“I’ve been to the dark side of the moon, too,” Ivanov said. “Recently. With Mattie.”
Althea had hardly noticed when, but his voice seemed to have become softer, gentler, as if he could tell that she was weary and upset and was trying to be kind.
“Why?” she asked, and tried to summon some of her defensive scorn. “To steal something?”
“Probably,” said Ivanov.
He did not immediately go on, so Althea said, “It must’ve been hard to be so close to home and not go home.” She was not good at being conciliatory. She rarely took the trouble to apologize.
“Mattie said the same thing,” he said.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him,” said Ivanov, “that if I went the few thousand kilometers to go see Earth, then I’d have to realize it would only be a couple hundred thousand kilometers to actually go to Earth. And then I’d take the Annwn and get shot down in the atmosphere.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he thought I wasn’t quite that stupid. He also told me it might be the last time I ever got to see her. I still said no.”
It made it even less comprehensible to her that he would have ever left Earth when he seemed to truly miss it.
“But,” Ivan said very softly and slowly indeed, “even so, when we left Luna, we went on a strangely precise trajectory. And so for a long time, as we were flying away, the Earth and the moon were right beside each other, like a child’s model, and North America was facing us just as evening was falling, the lights of cities starting up in the east and traveling slowly west until the planet was too far away to see.”
Althea had seen that image herself, beautiful, old, and perfect. She could hear his reverence for the planet, and she could hear a deep affection that until now Ivanov had kept well hidden.
“You miss him,” Althea said.
“Yes,” said Ivan, without lies and pretense.
Somewhere Matthew Gale was rotting in a metal coffin, falling in toward the sun. Another loss for Leontios Ivanov.
Perhaps it was because she knew of Mattie dead and of Constance and Milla Ivanov in danger, or perhaps because she, too, had seen the cruelty of Ida Stays’s eyes, or perhaps it was just because Ivanov had been honest with her, but Althea found the courage to ask, “Why did you leave Earth if you miss it so much? You were rich, had a bright future—you already lived on Earth. The System would have hired you in a second, even with—your father.”
“I know,” said Ivanov.
Althea said, “Did you leave Earth for the same reasons you tried to kill yourself when you were there?”
Ivanov was silent for a long time. His lack of an answer made the air seem heavier by the moment, like the anxious guilt curling in her chest.
“Did Ida ask you to ask me about that?” he said.
“No,” Althea said, her fingers skittering restlessly over the edges of the keyboard, and almost regretted asking. “I was just…I just wondered.”
“If you promise not to tell anyone, then I’ll tell you.”
She had expected him to turn on her, or to deny everything, or to simply refuse to say anything more. She had not expected him to answer the question.
That was not a promise Althea could keep. Simply talking to him was wrong enough. She would be able to wheedle her way out of trouble—serious trouble if Miss Stays ever found out—only by protesting that the discussions did not have to do with anything important. And even then she was on shaky ground.
On the other hand…
The camera in this part of the hallway was not working.
Althea looked up into it. Its black eye stared down at her, but whatever the Ananke saw, it was not sharing it with the System.
No one would know unless Althea or Ivanov told them. But to make the promise was to move from a gray area into the black, to deliberately keep information from her superiors, to be in some measure insubordinate.
“I promise,” Althea said.
Ivanov had to know what she was promising, but he said nothing about it. Instead, as if Althea’s promise had unlocked his tongue, he said, “Earth isn’t as wonderful as you think it is. There’s more surveillance there than there is on the outermost dwarf planets all combined.”
“So it’s safe,” Althea said, puzzled, because that was what the surveillance was at its core: a guarantee that nothing could happen to you that the System, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, wouldn’t know.
There was a silence as if Ivanov were working himself up to speak. “Yes,” he said at last in measured tones, “it’s safe. Like everyone being locked up in separate cages is safe. No one else can get at you, but you’re still in a cage. Especially if they think you’re predisposed to be dangerous.”
“So you tried to kill yourself because you felt trapped,” Althea said, trying to understand.
“Yes and no,” said Ivanov. “At first I thought—Some people’s brains don’t work quite right.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “It’s something in the programming.”
Althea lifted her chin, listening closely.
“You can’t change it, because that’s part of what makes them who they are,” said Ivan, and Althea thought of her machines and her programs, all with their unique little quirks, their personalities. She thought of the ones that did not run quite correctly or that ran in strange ways. People, she’d always thought, had less of a spectrum in their quality; either they worked perfectly and worked well within the System or they were flawed, bad bits of code, like Ivanov or Gale.
It was harder now to think of Ivan as nothing more than a flaw in the System.
“But I feel,” said Ivan, “all the time like I’m clinging to a rotting old pier over a cold sea, and I’m soaked to the skin from the spray and the rain. And it’s all I can do to hang on to the edge of the pier, because—there’s a woman in the water, a woman with dead eyes who’s part of the ocean itself, and she’s got one icy hand around my ankle and she’s trying to drag me down with her into the ocean.”
For an instant she could taste the salt, feel the frigid spray, the cold slick fingers around her ankle like a manacle.
“And I’m so tired of hanging on,” Ivan said. He almost seemed to be talking to someone other than her, to himself or to someone who wasn’t there, and it sent a chill down Althea’s spine. “There’s a hollow dark place inside my ribs instead of flesh and blood, and sometimes I just want to go down with her. On Earth I had no reason not to go down with her. Out here I have—I have reasons not to let go.”
Ida was aware of how close she stood to the edge. Her reputation, her force of personality, had brought her this far, but she had to get results. The System did not believe her theory about Ivanov and Gale, but after Titania, with the threat of worse to come, they were letting her take the risk because they were desperate for some success. But the burden of success was solely on her. She’d thought she’d had six more days; she had fewer now, however long it was between today and the Mallt-y-Nos’s next attack. If the Mallt-y-Nos attacked again and Ida still had nothing to tell the System—if she failed to get anything out of Harper or Doctor Ivanov—
It was not worth thinking about. She would get results. She was always right, always.
Time was ticking down. She could feel it in her bones like a bomb on a timer of unknown duration. It was not would it blow but when, and the constant knowledge that that unknown when drew ever more near.
“Milla Ivanov will arrive first,” she told Domitian as they walked together down the hall toward her second makeshift interrogation chamber. “Constance Harper second. The time of Harper’s arrival will overlap with Doctor Ivanov’s departure, so be ready.”
“You intend for them to meet,” Domitian said carefully, asking without asking.
Ida allowed herself to smile, but she knew it came out stiff and fierce.
“If both of them are as innocent as Ivanov claims, then they have never met before,” she said. “Let’s find out if they have.”
Ivan had not spoken since his confession, and Althea had kept the silence from her end. It was as if his words had spun a hollow shell of glass around the two of them; no matter what Althea said, her words would shatter the glass and she would not be able to go back to the way things were before.
Domitian arrived in that fragile silence with no more than a nod at her, although his eyes lingered on her face for a moment longer than she wanted to meet them, as if he were looking for something from her: anger or acceptance or apology. Althea did not have the courage to answer his silence, either. The moment was brief; Domitian did not waste time on unnecessary things. He opened the door to Ivan’s cell, his gun black and gleaming in one hand.
“On your feet, facing the wall,” said Domitian. Althea peered through the tiny window made by Domitian’s arm and the wall and saw Ivan, pale and slender, with his brilliant blue eyes darkly shadowed, rise slowly to his feet. Althea watched Domitian cuff him roughly and wondered why Ida Stays had seen fit to dress him in thin white hospital clothes, as if he were ill.
Domitian got a hand in the crook of Ivan’s elbow and hauled him out of the tiny cell and into the hallway, leading him away. Ivan did not look at Althea once. Perhaps he, too, found it easier to speak to Althea through the door, when they could not see each other’s faces.
She found herself unaccountably on the edge of tears, and it frustrated her, and so when she signaled Gagnon about a note he had left her in the comments of some code he had been examining, she was sharp and snappish. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said over the intercom. “What do you mean, ‘the rewriting is constants’?”
“I mean exactly what that means,” said Gagnon with such maddening uselessness that she briefly visualized beating his head against the walls of the Ananke until through the power of percussive maintenance the ship resumed normal operating status. “Except without the typo. The rewriting is constant; the ship keeps rewriting any fixes I make to that part of the code.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Althea snapped.
“The problem we’re facing, summed up in one sentence,” Gagnon said drily.
“I don’t want quips,” Althea said. “I want you to actually achieve what I tell you to do!”
A brief pause filled by the static sound of silence through the intercom’s speakers and then true silence as the connection cut off.
Althea, it seemed, could do nothing without guilt today. She bent over the machine and tried to put aside thoughts of Gagnon, and Ivan, and her own frustration. She was not having much success five minutes later when the sound of footsteps came down the hall, and she turned only reluctantly to see Gagnon walking down toward her, his hands in his pockets, his red hair starting to fall into his face in thin, wispy flyaways. He stopped beside her and said, as if there were no hurry and he hadn’t just left his post unmanned, “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” Althea said. “I’m busy.”
Gagnon was nodding and frowning at the same time in the way that Althea hated because it meant he was understanding something about her that she didn’t want him to understand. “Didn’t sound like nothing,” he said.
“Shouldn’t you be in the control room?”
He leaned against the wall with one shoulder, boxing her in, too close. Althea suddenly had a flash of a memory from when she was a child, when a little boy had come and leaned over her shoulder too close and tried to take away her computer from her. She’d punched and kicked him until he’d run away.
“Doctor Ivanov and Harper aren’t scheduled for another fifteen minutes,” he said.
“But they’ll enter Ananke’s sensor range soon,” said Althea.
He made that frowning, nodding face again.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I should really be up there. You know, you should answer my question so I can get back up there in time.”
“I answered your question.”
“Lying isn’t answering the question.”
“Who are you, Ida Stays?” Althea snapped, and immediately wished she could have kept her mouth shut.
Gagnon was regarding her steadily. “Is this about Miss Stays? Has she been giving you a hard time?”
“No,” Althea said, but she glanced against her will toward Ivan’s open cell.
Gagnon followed her gaze. “This is about the prisoner?” he asked. “Has he been bothering you?”
“No!” Althea said too vehemently, she decided after saying it, and tried to calm her tone. “He hasn’t been bothering me.”
“But…?”
“But I feel bad for him,” Althea said, and it seemed like only the barest, meanest explanation of what she felt.
Gagnon was looking at her, perfectly baffled. “Why?” he asked.
“Because”—now that she had opened the subject, it seemed easier to express—“because of his mother, and because of…of Constance, and because Miss Stays is torturing him…”
“Miss Stays isn’t torturing him,” Gagnon said, sounding amused but looking at her with something too close to concern. “Has he been talking to you?”
“Ivanov?” Althea asked, stalling, having remembered to use his surname at the last moment.
Gagnon gave her a look as if he thought she might have been struck suddenly stupid. “Sometimes,” Althea admitted, and Gagnon’s expression darkened.
“Damn it, Al,” he said. “And you’ve been listening to him.”
“I can’t not hear when he talks.”
“Yeah, but you’ve been listening.” Althea did not like the look on Gagnon’s face; it skated too close to the expression that meant he was going to tell Domitian.
“I’m not going to tell Domitian,” he said, and she was embarrassed to have been so obvious. “I just…” He stopped and chewed on the inside of his lip. “I’ll make sure he stops bothering you, Al,” he said.
Althea tried to ask what he meant by that, but her words were drowned out by the sudden wailing of the Ananke’s alarm.
Ida burst out of her second interrogation room at the screaming alarm, looking up and down the hallway for someone to demand answers from.
The ship screamed and wailed as she hurried down to the control room and unlocked the door, but there was no one inside.
“Son of a bitch,” she hissed, and then snapped at the ceiling, “Enough!” without really expecting to be heard.
The ship continued deafly blaring that deafening sound.
Running footsteps. Ida turned to see Gagnon coming up the hallway, followed by the shorter, wild-haired figure of Althea Bastet. Gagnon avoided Ida’s gaze—a sign of guilt; doubtless he was the one who was supposed to be manning the control room—but Althea’s round brown eyes lingered on hers for a moment before breaking away, and Ida could not quite read her expression.
It was unimportant. Ida had full control over the ship once again. However Doctor Bastet would rather things be was entirely irrelevant.
Ida stood in the center of the room as Althea and Gagnon rushed from console to console, watching their frantic motions, listening to Gagnon say, “It’s not a machine error,” and Althea say, “It’s not an internal alert,” and Gagnon say, “So what is it?”
The most they managed to do was shut off the wailing alarm, the most basic of tasks. Ida stood perfectly still and felt her fury grow.
“Found it!” said Althea, leaning so far over the screen that more frizzed curls popped free of her loose braid and dangled downward, as if reaching to connect to the machine below. “It’s the proximity sensor. It’s sending up an alert for…a weapon fired at the ship?”
“There are no weapons discharges in this area,” Gagnon reported from another screen.
“It’s telling me about some danger heading toward us,” said Althea, sounding frustrated.
Ida said in her sweetest, politest tone with her heaviest of affected Terran accents, “You need to fix this computer.”
The tension in the room increased tangibly. They had been so absorbed that they had seemed to have forgotten her presence. When it became apparent that Althea was not going to respond, Gagnon said, “Yes, ma’am. We’re doing our best.”
Ida could have stripped them of their jobs, their titles, their qualifications, for such incompetence on so important a ship. She could have done the same thing to their families and close associates if need be. Gagnon clearly knew it and feared it, but Althea Bastet—stubborn still, still resistant—did not respond to her.
It irked Ida, made her want to strike at Althea again, but she had no reason to do so—the woman was not actually being insubordinate—and so she controlled herself.
“Got it,” said Althea, although she sounded a little muted and her back still was to Ida. “It’s the proximity sensor. Doctor Ivanov’s ship just came into range. It triggered a reaction in the ship.”
“Got some wires crossed,” Gagnon muttered. Ida looked at him incredulously.
The intercom came on.
“I am in the white room,” said Domitian’s even tones, made especially even at the moment. “Do not explain over the intercom. Send someone down to guard Ivanov. I will come up.”
Althea Bastet started to stand, but Gagnon was faster.
“I’ll go,” he said, and Althea looked as if he had slapped her in the face as he hurried from the room, leaving the two women alone together.
Ida watched Althea and watched Althea avoid looking at her. Simply by standing there in silence, Ida could see that her presence was making Althea tense, but Althea said nothing to her, her downcast eyes scanning the screen before her with more attention than it deserved. Perhaps the mechanic had learned her place after all.
Something beeped, and the mechanic moved to look at the relevant screen while Ida stood in the center of the room and watched her, full of power.
“She’s hailing us,” Althea said. She was obligated by regulations to report such a message to Ida; Ida was certain she would have said nothing at all if she hadn’t been required to. “She wants permission to dock.”
“Grant it,” said Ida, as cool and calm as if she were indifferent to Althea’s presence when Althea was so affected by hers. “And send Domitian to the docking bay when he arrives.” She took the moment as the perfect time to depart and leave Althea with an order, with Ida having had the last word.
Domitian caught up to her at the doors to the docking bay. They were sealed as an air lock; beyond them the vast mouth of the Ananke was opening to admit a small, gleaming ship.
“I’ll escort the both of you to your room, then to the white room,” Domitian said quietly, clarifying, and Ida nodded slightly.
The ship landed lightly. It was sleek and small, the newest model from Earth. The great doors of the Ananke slid slowly shut overhead, and Ida waited until the light beside the bay doors turned green, indicating the repressurization of the space beyond.
She pushed open the glass doors and stepped out into the vast hollowness of the docking bay; across from her, out of the sleek ship stepped a sleek woman who glanced briefly around the room before fixing her attention on Ida.
The years, Ida knew from her study of the woman, had hardened Milla Ivanov into perfect clarity, as pressure did to a diamond. No expression showed on her face. The woman walking toward Ida had aged out of her beauty but kept her handsomeness, her blond hair lightened to white, her forehead and the corners of her mouth outlined in the marks of frowns. Doctor Ivanov was the type of woman who would go to slenderness and fragility as she aged, and indeed she had already started down that path, but even though her wrists seemed small enough to snap, when she took Ida’s hand, her grip was firm.
She had the same brilliant blue eyes as her son and the same intensity in her stare.
“Miss Stays,” said Milla Ivanov. She had a soft voice. At lectures, she always needed a microphone.
“Doctor Ivanov,” said Ida, and smiled charmingly. “A pleasure to meet you. Please call me Ida.”
Milla Ivanov neither acknowledged the liberty nor returned it. She simply released Ida’s hand when Ida released hers and said, “I assume you have a room prepared.”
Milla Ivanov had been the subject of more interrogations than Ida had ever performed. It put Ida at a slight disadvantage, perhaps, but in the end she still had Milla’s son.
She smiled and said, “Of course. Right this way.”
Doctor Ivanov seemed not to notice or simply not to care that Domitian followed them at a politely dangerous distance. She kept pace beside Ida, her flats striking the ground more softly than the click, click of Ida’s heels.
Ida said nothing until they reached the door to the second interrogation chamber. This chamber was smaller, almost cozy; the room had been used for storage of various valuable equipment that Ida had had removed. The ceiling was a trifle low, not enough to bother Ida but enough to induce the faintest feeling of claustrophobia when combined with the dark uniform metal of the walls, ceiling, and floor. The only object left inside the room was a table rather like the one in the white room but smaller, with two chairs on either side.
Ida led the way inside and signaled to Milla to take the chair with its back to the door, seating herself opposite. Milla Ivanov sat with her back perfectly straight and her hands folded loosely in her lap and did not even blink when Domitian swung the creaking door shut behind them.
For a moment, Ida simply enjoyed the setting. Milla Ivanov sat across from her in the very same way her son had every day for a week. The resemblance between mother and son was impressive: the same blue eyes, the same shape of jaw and lip, the same close, careful attention. The only differences that Ida could see were that Milla Ivanov did not waste her time with charm as her son did and that unlike Ivan, Milla was not in chains.
Not yet, perhaps.
“Doctor Ivanov, I’m afraid I’m going to have to confess I’m a bit of a fan,” Ida said with the slightest bashful smile. “To be perfectly honest, you were one of my role models as a child. A brilliant, successful woman who rose in spite of all the adversity that surrounded her.” Ida sighed. “It is something I have always admired.”
She had admired even more the way Milla had lied and performed at her husband’s trial, using her infant son as a prop to save her own skin.
“I am glad to inspire,” said Milla Ivanov, her voice crisp, tonally perfect, and perfectly empty. She tilted her head ever so slightly to the side, and Ida had a sudden flash of Ivan making the same motion. “I have heard something of you, too. Of your impressive and rapid rise to fame.”
If Ida had not been paying attention, she might have mistaken that for a compliment.
Ida held her smile for a moment while she reconsidered. Charm, then, was out. So directness it was.
“Doctor Ivanov,” Ida said, leaning forward onto the table and looking serious and concerned, “are you aware of the events surrounding your son lately?”
Perhaps the briefest flicker of blue eyes. Milla said, “I haven’t been in contact with my son since he left home.”
“But you are aware.”
“Through what has been told me through System news broadcasts,” said Milla Ivanov, “and the occasional ill-timed System questioning on the subject.”
This barb seemed to cut especially deeply for being spoken in Milla’s crystalline Terran accent, unsoftened by a childhood on Venus or an adulthood in the outer planets.
“I apologize for this inconvenience,” said Ida. “I’m afraid it was quite necessary.”
“Every time my son steals from a grocery store, the System comes to question me about his habits, taking me from my studies and from my lectures,” said Milla. She cocked her head to the side again, even more strongly reminiscent of her son. “What is one more interruption in the middle of my vacation?”
“I will try to make this interrogation as brief as possible,” said Ida. “But it is, of course, for the good of the System.”
“I will do my duty as a citizen,” Milla Ivanov said. “You went through all the trouble of blindfolding my computer’s navigation system and bringing me to a ship in the middle of nowhere. I assume this is important.”
Even as Ida kept her smile fixed at the reminder of the difficulties she had been forced to go through to obtain this interview and the increased pressures from the System that now weighed on her, the thought occurred to her that Milla was fishing for information on the nature of the Ananke. Even if Ida had been so inclined or so foolish as to answer, she would have nothing to tell the other woman.
“The last time you spoke to your son was ten years ago; am I correct?” Ida asked.
“Yes.”
“I’d like you to describe the incident for me, if you please,” said Ida.
“You have it all on camera,” said Milla Ivanov. Briefly, Ida enjoyed the comparison of Milla’s protest to the ones Ivan had been making all week long. “My accounting will not be so detailed.”
“Even so,” Ida said, and wondered if the mother would have the same flair for storytelling as the son.
“Leon woke up late,” said Milla. “It was a few days after he had graduated. He came downstairs. I had circled some job opportunities for him in the paper and left it at his place. He read them, said that he had somewhere to go, and left. There is nothing more to it than that. I said nothing to him.”
She spoke in the clipped, emotionless tones of a woman who had repeated this story many times, reporting with the same bare factuality as a machine. Ida remembered watching the scene from the Ivanov house surveillance. Milla Ivanov had been sitting at the table with her back to the glorious sunrise coming up over the mountains that was visible through the glass wall behind her. She had hardly looked up from the notes in front of her as Ivan came down, looked at the paper his mother had left him, and then stood and watched his mother for a long, silent span of time.
Milla Ivanov, drumming her fingers arrhythmically against the tabletop, had not noticed her son’s attention. She looked up only when Ivan told her he was leaving and looked at him for perhaps a moment too long—or perhaps that was only Ida reading into what she saw—before nodding tersely.
Ivan had left, and Milla had gone back to work. She had not even looked up when the sound of Ivan’s ship roared through the house and rattled the dishes he had left untouched. Ida had wondered if Milla regretted not saying anything that last time her son left or regretted not realizing he was leaving, not trying to stop him, but with Milla Ivanov in front of her now, regret seemed like it would be a foreign thing to her.
“Did you not have any idea your son was leaving for good?” Ida asked.
“No,” Milla said. “My son has always been very good at hiding what he is thinking, even from me.”
Ida would not even have wasted a guess on who he had learned that particular art from. “Would it surprise you to know that your son has a series of your lectures saved on his ship?”
This time Ida was certain that something passed over Milla Ivanov’s face, something like surprise, or grief, perhaps.
“I know nothing of it if that is what you’re asking,” she said. “Which lectures?”
“Computer science,” said Ida.
Milla nodded more to herself than to Ida and for the first time looked away from Ida. It freed Ida to let her mask slip slightly, to let her focus more on the mask Milla Ivanov was wearing.
“I assume you did not bring me here to ask me about my son’s viewing habits,” Milla said.
“You have to understand that the recordings were a little suspicious.”
“Suspicious?” Milla’s expression could have frozen the sun. “The lectures were publicly broadcast. Computer science is his preferred field. And he is my son. There is nothing suspicious about that at all.”
Ivan’s interest in the subject would make the lectures the perfect method for passing along a message, and Milla Ivanov had to realize that. “Have you ever tried to get into contact with your son?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Ida asked, and when Milla simply looked at her as if the answer to that question should be obvious, clarified, “Surely as a mother you would want to save your son from himself.”
“Blood will out,” said Milla Ivanov in her chilly distant way. “That is what the System says, is it not? If the parent has…anti-System tendencies, then so will the child. It was only a matter of time before Leon took after his father.”
The utter lack of emotion briefly stymied Ida. She relied so often on her own relative poise to crack open the people she interrogated along the cracks created by their sentiment, but Milla Ivanov, she was starting to realize, was as impervious as a diamond. She had not expected to be able to break Milla; other investigators with far more time and experience had failed to do so, but now she was starting to fear that neither would she be able to get Milla Ivanov to slip.
“That is what the System believes,” Ida said. “Is that not what you believe?”
“It has proved itself true,” said Milla Ivanov.
Ida leaned on her elbows.
“Come now,” she said. “Tell me what you think, Doctor Ivanov.”
One white eyebrow arched up.
“I wish that my son had stayed on Earth,” Milla said. “I wish that Leon had lived a peaceful, safe, successful life in harmony with the System instead of being hunted down like an animal.”
It was spoken with what sounded like honesty, or at least as much honesty as so cold a woman could display, but it was exactly what Milla Ivanov was supposed to say, and so Ida waited a moment longer, searching Milla’s face for a lie that was not there to see.
“Did you ever notice any signs,” Ida asked, “when your son was living with you that he might be taking after his father?”
A brief silence.
“His father was also occasionally stricken with melancholy,” said Milla in what could only be a deliberate misunderstanding of Ida’s question.
Ida gave her a condescending smile. She expected that to annoy Doctor Ivanov, but if it did, she could not see it. “I meant delinquent behavior.”
“No,” Milla said. “I noticed nothing.”
“And how about revolutionary sympathies?”
“My son never took after his father that way,” said Milla, her words very short, very clipped.
Ida lowered her tone.
“He has told me,” she said, “about how he was taken to see Saturn when he was very young. About how deeply that upset him.”
Milla’s gaze was boring holes through her skull.
“Did you never realize,” Ida asked with a delicate lance of disbelief in her voice, “that he felt so bad for them? That he didn’t truly appreciate the necessity of the System’s decision? Did you truly never notice that he blamed the System, in the smallest of measures, for the atrocities he saw?”
“As I said,” Milla Ivanov told her, “my son is very good at hiding his thoughts, even from me.”
Ida made a show of hesitation, of thinking, and then spoke as if she were sharing information that she was supposed to keep to herself. “The System has great reason to believe that your son is involved in revolutionary activities.” All of Milla’s attention was visibly on Ida, but her face remained impassive. Ida said, “Once this comes to light, it will call into question certain aspects of your parenting and your obedience to the System.”
“It may be questioned,” Milla said. “The answers will remain as they have been for thirty years.”
“And if signs are found that you failed to recognize at the time…”
“Signs of what? There were no ‘signs,’ Miss Stays. And my son would not be so foolish as to involve himself in any revolutionary activity.”
“No?”
“No,” said Milla. “Leon is individualistic. To be in a revolution requires a loss of the self to something more. My son would not be able to tolerate such a thing.”
“Doctor Ivanov, we have evidence…”
“Then you have misread it,” said Milla Ivanov. “Perhaps you are simply wrong, Miss Stays.”
For a long moment Ida sat perfectly still.
Then she said, “For seven years you did not have the faintest idea that your husband, the man with whom you shared a house, a name, and a bed, was involved in attempting to sever the Saturnian system from the solar system. Your husband was attempting to pull off the largest rebellion in the past two hundred years. And you did not have the faintest inkling of what he was doing.”
Milla Ivanov said nothing.
“And you would have me believe,” said Ida, “that a woman so intelligent as you, so adaptive, wouldn’t learn to keep an eye on the kind of signs that she claims to have missed in her husband? You would have me believe that you would not be on your guard for them to appear in your own son?”
Milla Ivanov’s expression was as cold as the far reaches of space, where the sun was just a star, colder than ice, as cold as the hollowness of the void. Ida said, “Or is this one more instance of such convenient ignorance?”
In the silence that followed, only the distant groans of machinery could be heard. And in that silence Milla spoke.
“Let me explain to you what you are,” she said. “You are but one in a long line of interrogators to think you can make your name by unmaking me. You are nothing more than a gear in a machine I am well familiar with, and you are saying and asking the same things I have been told and asked for thirty years. The System has only ever proved my innocence. Do you think to succeed where thirty years of others have failed?”
Ida stayed frozen in place, conscious of the way that without moving, by speaking only just loudly enough to be heard, Milla Ivanov had taken the power of the situation from her.
Milla said, “I assumed that this interrogation had some relevance and was not intended to discuss thirty-year-old rumors.”
For a moment Ida wanted, with keen desire, to tear apart Milla’s son before the mother’s eyes.
It was only the thought that eventually she would destroy Ivan that gave her the strength to continue the interrogation.
Hallway, hallway, hallway; control room, hallway; the very end of the hallway, the very base of the ship’s spine; hallway, a room where Ida Stays sat across from white-haired Milla Ivanov. Althea paused in her flipping through the working cameras’ feeds to watch just for a moment.
She flipped away.
Hallway, hallway, storage room; hallway, the core with its rays of plasma arching away from its dark heart, hallway, the white room—
Althea flipped back immediately. The cameras in the white room had not been working before. For an instant she saw the scene from high above: Ivan sitting pale and chained in place and Gagnon leaning over the table saying something to him.
It took the sound a moment to catch up with the video. Gagnon was saying, “…her alone.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Ivan said with precision, and an angle to his jaw that spoke of defiance.
“You’ve been talking to her,” said Gagnon.
“And is it a crime to talk?”
“I want you to leave Althea Bastet alone.”
“And if I say no? What, will you tell Ida?”
Althea’s heart jolted under a sudden rush of adrenaline, but Gagnon seemed to realize that he couldn’t tell Ida, either. “I’ll keep you away from her,” he threatened.
Ivan laughed, and Althea realized how small and how weak Gagnon’s threat had been; it was not even a threat, nothing more than a protective impulse. Her humiliation and her anger that Gagnon would talk to Ivan about her were humbled in the face of that impulse, and she knew that she could not possibly confront Gagnon about it.
“Go ahead,” Ivan said. “Try to chain me up some more.”
Althea would have listened longer, but the feed abruptly cut out, and she could not bring it back again.
It did confirm one thing, at least. The computer was receiving the feeds from the nonfunctional cameras. It simply wasn’t sharing them with her. She also suspected that from now on she would find herself scheduled for shifts that coincided with times when Ivan was being interrogated so that she could not guard his door while she worked.
She was not certain whether she was relieved or disappointed.
To her right, on the wall against the door, the perpetual System broadcast was playing.
This time it was a man on the screen. He was handsome, but he did not have blue eyes.
“At 200 Earth Standard Time this morning, System forces suppressed another destructive riot on the Neptunian moon Galatea, restoring order,” the subtitles read while his lips moved soundlessly above. Althea did not need the sound on the display to be on to hear his Terran accent. “The gathering began as an apparent protest regarding System efforts to supplement the moon’s agricultural output.”
The screen changed to a grainy surveillance camera view of the riot. On the dirty ice surface of Galatea, barren and gray, people crowded together, shouting and wild. They looked vicious. They looked dangerous. The camera cut back shortly to the handsome man, the image having lasted only long enough for anyone watching the news to witness the violence of the rabble, its inhumanity.
“Its true nature as a terrorist plot became apparent when the mob attacked the residence of System Governor Enrico Boltzmann, a decorated servant of the System, and murdered him in his home. After his death, the System intervened, ending the hostilities with a blow to the greenhouse enclosure.”
A blow to the greenhouse enclosure meant breaking the enclosure, allowing the trapped atmosphere and heat to rush out, suffocating the rioters in the sudden thinness of the air. Althea swallowed and did her best not to show what else she thought. The camera in the piloting room was still operational and broadcasting Althea’s image live to the System.
“The System suspects that this riot was also instigated by the Mallt-y-Nos, as with the riots on Titania, which are still being subdued,” said the handsome man, whose eyes were as blank as those of the other newscaster, as guarded as Ivanov’s had been in the picture in his file. “But rest assured, the System will do anything to protect its citizens.”
Althea turned away. She no longer wanted to look at the earthscape behind the newscaster’s head, the verdant greens of Earth, the perfect blue of its sky unenclosed by any greenhouse. She turned back to the Ananke and flipped through the working camera feeds one last time, pausing on the tableau of Milla Ivanov, seated like her son, with Ida leaning on the table across from her.
Althea closed the program, but she could not stop herself from thinking.
“Where are we going?” Milla asked as Ida gestured for her to walk with her down the hall, farther away from the docking bay.
“We have one more stop to make.”
Nothing Milla had said had caught Ida’s attention. She would check it all, of course, but everything seemed to be in order: Milla’s story seemed true. In any case, whether she could have Milla Ivanov arrested was less important than here, than now. Ida wondered what Milla’s reaction to her son in chains would be, if that at last would draw something from the doctor.
Ida wondered how Ivan would change when he saw his mother.
When they reached the doorway to the white room, Milla Ivanov stopped. “My son is in there,” she said. It was not a question.
“Yes,” Ida said. She pushed open the door.
Domitian was standing beside the table in the precise center of the vast, bright room, a few steps away from the figure in the chair. The chains on Ivan’s arms were visible even from the door, and the cloth of his shirt was so thin that it fell loosely and followed the shape of his body, as if he were exposed, uncovered, trapped, and vulnerable. His back was toward the door.
Without a word, Milla Ivanov headed for the table and her son. Ida followed, the sound of her heels ringing out, filling the vast empty space with echoes.
Ivan said, “Ida?”
“No,” said his mother in her quiet voice, and Ivan jerked his head around just as she stepped into the range of his vision.
For a long moment mother and son simply looked at each other.
Ivan, Ida saw, was afraid, and while Milla Ivanov looked at him—at the dark shadows beneath his eyes, at the chains around his wrists—her jaw grew tight. Their focus on each other was so complete that it was as if Ida and Domitian were not in the room at all.
Ivan said, “They brought you all the way out here?”
“Apparently,” Milla said, “they had some questions for me that couldn’t possibly be answered at an outside facility.”
A moment of grim understanding passed between the Ivanovs. If Ida had not had to school her expression, she would have smiled.
Milla Ivanov shifted position, the first overt display of discomfort Ida had seen on her, crossing her arms across her chest and drumming her fingers without rhythm on the sleeve of her jacket. Her customary nervous tic.
“How are you doing?” Milla asked abruptly.
“Great,” said Ivan, with a special sort of sarcasm that did not seem to know whether it wanted to be sarcastic. “Really fantastic. How about you?”
“Very well,” said Milla. “I got tenure.”
“That’s good.”
What Milla’s ironclad accounting of her movements had not done to convince Ida that mother and son had not spoken in ten years, witnessing the stilted and awkward nature of this interaction was doing. They truly had not been in contact, at least not for a long time.
“Did you miss me?” Ivan asked. His fingers were twitching against the arms of his chair.
“No.” Milla paused. “I got a dog.”
After a beat, Ivan grinned. It was not like the smiles Ida had seen him direct her way. This was the kind of smile she saw directed at Matthew Gale in the surveillance footage she had watched: wide, honest, as bright and brilliant as his eyes. At the sight of that smile, Milla’s expression softened, but Ida thought she was rather close to weeping.
“I wish you could’ve met Constance,” Ivan said, his grin fading away. “You would’ve liked her, Mom.”
Milla let out a breath and looked away, in the opposite direction from Ida and Domitian; when she turned her head back, her eyes were dry but she might as well have let herself weep, because Ida could see the grief on her face.
“I take it she was your girlfriend?” Milla asked.
“She was,” Ivan answered. He was being perfectly serious when he said, “You and she would have had a lot in common.”
Milla nodded very slightly, her fingers still tapping against her arm. It was convenient that Ivan had brought up Constance, Ida thought; it would lend weight to the meeting Ida had arranged.
This time the silence stretched out almost unbearably. Mother and son no longer met each other’s eyes. Ivan stared instead at the drumming of his mother’s fingers.
“Have you seen enough?” Milla asked suddenly, sharply, and she was looking at Ida.
Ida smiled graciously. “If you’re done.”
“I am.”
“Follow me,” Ida said, and started toward the door, but she was halfway across the room before she realized that Milla had not followed her.
She turned. Milla still stood beside Ivan’s chair. Domitian had one hand raised to urge her along but was not yet touching her shoulder. Milla reached down to her son, taking his cheek in one hand and bending down to press a kiss to his forehead. Ivan closed his eyes and swallowed, and he stayed in that attitude as Milla Ivanov strode away to join Ida at and out the door.
The alarm went off again while Althea was still trying to determine the error that had caused it to go off the first time.
This time, when the alarm went off, she jumped up almost before her mind had consciously processed the sound and went to the other terminal, shutting off the alarm and looking immediately to see if the proximity sensors had been triggered.
They had. Constance Harper had just come into range. Althea took a breath, and in that brief moment of inattention, the alarm came back on.
“Come on!” she said, and shut it off again, but it resumed its wailing. “Ananke! Come on!”
The alarm went silent.
From behind Althea a voice said, “You need to fix the computer.” Ida Stays stood in the doorway, dark eyes, dark lips, dark look.
Before Althea could react—to bow and scrape in fear of Ida’s rage; to shout in frustration of her own?—the alarm turned back on again.
“Doctor Bastet,” Ida said over the screaming of the alarm, but Althea ignored her, arrested by the message before her on the screen.
“The Ananke is reading more than one life-sign on Miss Harper’s ship,” she reported.
Ida was suddenly standing very close to Althea. Althea tried not to flinch as she leaned over the panel, her wine-dark lips pursed. “Go to the secondary interrogation room,” she said. “Send Domitian here. Stay with Doctor Ivanov yourself.”
“What?” Althea said, certain she had misheard.
“Did I stutter?” Ida asked, and Althea fled.
Ida’s “secondary interrogation room” had once been Althea’s storage closet. She reached it quickly and had to knock only once before Domitian swung the door open.
“Miss Stays wants you in the control room. I’m to stay here,” Althea said breathlessly, and Domitian frowned but obeyed, pushing past her to stride back toward the control room.
Milla Ivanov sat in the chair that had been Ida’s. She watched the exchange without a word. Althea stepped uncertainly just inside the room and let the door swing shut behind her. The sound of it closing seemed overly loud in the cramped, empty space.
Milla Ivanov was still watching her with disquieting eyes that were unnervingly similar to Ivan’s. Althea looked into the corner of the room in the hope that that would make the woman stop watching her, but she was uneasily certain that Milla was continuing to stare.
“Are you one of the people interrogating my son?” Milla asked. She had a quiet voice, and even aside from the uncanny similarity to Ivan, Althea could remember attending some of Milla Ivanov’s lectures and watching her lean into the microphone to be heard.
“No,” Althea said. “I’m just the mechanic.”
Milla’s eyes flicked up and down her body.
“I suppose you are,” she said, and her gaze, her attention, held Althea as pinned as Ivan’s ever had.
“You should be careful, little mechanic,” Milla Ivanov said, and the resemblance to Ivan was even stronger now, though Althea could not have said precisely how; perhaps there was something dangerous, something wolfish about her. Milla said, “These people don’t care about you or your ship.”
“I’m afraid we received no communication to that effect,” Ida said in as sweet and calm a voice as she could manage as she spoke through the ship’s intercom.
“I was assured it had been sent.” Constance Harper’s voice was low for a woman, almost husky, but it was clear and carrying. She had a Mirandan accent that Mars had not been able to wash out.
“We did not receive it,” Ida said, a little sharply. Behind her, the door creaked open and Domitian entered. She beckoned him over.
“I could have it sent again,” Constance said, and Ida muted the communication for just long enough to bring Domitian up to speed.
“She fosters dogs for training,” Ida said. “As part of a System program. They can’t be left alone, and she says that the summons was too sudden for her to find a sitter, so she brought them with her. Two dogs. The System base on Mars allegedly approved this and sent us paperwork, but I was not told.”
“I’ll look for it,” Domitian promised, and moved to another interface, skimming through the communiqués received by the Ananke.
Ida unmuted the machine.
“Please bear in mind,” she said as mildly as she could, “that if you are found to have been lying, you will be arrested and your business seized while the investigation commences.”
“I am not lying,” said Constance Harper.
Domitian lifted a hand and caught her attention. Ida muted the speaker again. “What?”
“I found it. It’s all in order.”
“Then why wasn’t I told?”
“It appears the Ananke has not been notifying the crew of the arrival of new messages,” Domitian said. He looked grim. “And with everything that has been going on, none of us has been checking.”
Ida swore. She stayed for a moment with her head bowed, bent over the control panel, seething and trying quietly to bring herself back under control.
Finally she raised her head, unmuted the connection, and said sweetly to Constance, “You may board, Miss Harper.”
Domitian came up beside Ida. There was a certain reassurance to his presence, solid and broad and strong. He leaned over her shoulder and started some program on the Ananke.
“For docking,” he said at her unspoken question.
“Will it work?” Ida snapped.
“If it doesn’t, Althea needs to fix it, not me,” said Domitian. Ida forced herself to take a breath and nodded.
“Let’s collect Doctor Ivanov, then,” she said, and brushed past Domitian out the door.
Althea Bastet answered the door at Ida’s sharp knock with her brown eyes held wide and stood aside to let them in immediately.
“If you would come with us, please,” Ida said, and Milla stood up.
“I apologize for the inconvenience,” said Ida as they walked toward the double glass doors leading into the docking bay. “And I thank you for your cooperation.”
Through the glass, an old ungainly ship was landing carefully behind the Annwn, beside Milla’s sleek little top-of-the-line craft. Milla said, “Who is that?”
“You’ll see,” Ida said, and met Milla’s measuring glance.
The light came on, indicating that the bay was safe to enter; Ida led the way toward the ship that had landed.
Someone had painted the ship’s name on its side rather than having it engraved. The paint was red and had been done with a heavy hand; drops of red sliding from the letters had dried in place. The ship was named the Janus, and beneath the bleeding letters a door opened.
The first thing to come out of the door was a black nose, followed by a black snout and then a second one, two canine heads sniffing at the unfamiliar air. “Back, sit!” a woman’s voice ordered, and both snouts retreated and did not return. Constance Harper stepped out of the door with her hands in the air.
Constance was dressed like a working woman in boots and jeans and a plain top. Her hair, long and brown, was up in a ponytail, and the tip of it brushed against her freckled shoulders. While Domitian went into her ship with his gun out to search it, she stood aside, palms extended, with the patience of someone who had endured this treatment before.
A moment later Domitian stepped out and nodded to Ida. All clear.
Only then did Ida smile at Constance.
“Miss Harper,” she said, coming forward. Constance, seeing that she was no longer obligated to prove her lack of weaponry, lowered her hands and strode forward.
Constance’s grip was callused and cool. “Nice to meet you,” she said with rote abruptness. She kept glancing over Ida’s shoulder to where Ida knew Milla Ivanov stood. Ida watched her expression closely.
“I am Ida Stays,” Ida said, pulling her hand from Constance’s grip. “You may call me Ida. I assume”—she turned slightly, angling her body toward Milla Ivanov—“that you know my other guest, Doctor Ivanov…?”
“We have never met,” said Milla, chilly, but when she looked at Constance, her expression was less cool, almost curious, for all that Ida could read her. Milla extended her hand, and Constance came forward to take it.
“Doctor Ivanov was just on her way home,” Ida said. Milla glanced at her—past her—and then her attention snapped back to Constance.
“It’s nice to meet you, Doctor Ivanov,” Constance said. “I’m a friend of your son’s.”
Milla stood perfectly still for a moment, her head angled slightly to the side, the same way that Ivan looked when he had been stricken by a thought and wanted to give nothing away.
Milla Ivanov pulled her hand out of Constance’s grip with a quick snap of her wrist that spoke of disgust.
“I know,” she said. “I know what you are. I know that you and your…and your friends are the reason that my son is here.”
Milla’s soft voice had risen in brittle anger. Ida was shocked and knew she was showing it, but an outburst had been the very last thing she had expected from Milla Ivanov.
“I think there’s been a mistake,” said Constance evenly, frowning at Milla.
Domitian came up behind Ida and said softly into her ear, “Do you want me to break this up?”
“Absolutely not,” said Ida.
“Has there been?” asked Milla, and then pointed at Ida and Domitian. “Look at them. Look at the kind of people you have sent my son to. Look at them!”
Constance turned and looked at Ida—at Domitian—at the space between them. Ida almost turned to Domitian to comment on the encounter, to ask him to remind her to bring it up against Ivan, but Constance’s clear loud voice caught her attention, and she turned again to face the scene.
“That’s a lie,” said Constance. “Ivan hasn’t done anything because of me that would get him locked up.”
Milla Ivanov laughed. It was thin and sarcastic, and she turned her heel on Constance and paced a few steps away. Constance pursued her, anger in the line of her spine. There was something larger about her when she was angry, something greater, as if the force of her passion made her something more. Ida turned to keep them both directly in her sight.
“He’s here because of revolutionary activities,” Milla said. “I don’t suppose that was you.”
“Of course not,” said Constance. There was force to the way she spoke, along with certainty. “I am a loyal servant of the System just like you, Doctor Ivanov.”
Milla scoffed. Ida considered the honesty in Constance’s declaration and did not find it wanting.
“I haven’t forced your son to do anything,” Constance said. “Ivan is his own man. He doesn’t listen to me.”
“Oh, and should he?” Milla mocked.
“Yes!” Constance had a voice that carried, no, more: it filled the entire space of the docking bay up to the high ceiling. “If he had, he would not have ended up here.”
Whatever Milla Ivanov might have spoken was drowned out by the barking of dogs.
Constance swore and dashed back to her ship, running between Domitian and Ida and ordering the dogs to “Sit! Still! Sit!”
The dogs went silent, and a moment later Constance, a little red-faced, stepped back out of the ship.
“Permission to seal my ship?” she asked, looking at Ida. “The dogs will be quieter if they’re enclosed.”
“Granted,” Ida said, and Constance shut the door and locked it. She pushed back some escaped wisps of hair with one hand, then came forward and said to Milla, “I’m sorry for shouting.”
Ida looked at Milla, who seemed calm again, though her fingers were drumming restlessly against her hip.
“Likewise,” said Milla, her voice soft again. “I should not have snapped. You and I have something in common. Perhaps I shall buy you a drink.”
“I’ll buy you one,” said Constance. “I own a bar. Will you be visiting Mars any time soon?”
“I am vacationing on Mars these next few weeks,” Milla said. “Where is your bar?”
“It’s called the Fox and the Hound. It’s by the Valles Marineris. Stop by soon and your drinks are on the house,” said Constance.
There were few things Ida was certain of when it came to Milla Ivanov; she was, however, certain that Milla had never met Constance Harper before. Milla nodded stiffly and said, “I will. Permission to depart, Miss Stays?”
“Of course,” said Ida sweetly.
Milla met Constance’s eyes one more time—Constance dipped her chin in a nod or acknowledgment—then Milla went inside her sleek little ship and Ida led Constance and Domitian out into the hallway while behind them the great doors of the Ananke opened once more to space and Milla Ivanov left the ship for good.
“I apologize for the difficulties surrounding your arrival,” Ida said as she and Constance arrived at the second interrogation room. “Somehow the communiqué was misfiled.”
“It happens,” Constance said with her lack of interest poorly hidden. This woman was no Milla Ivanov.
Ida guided Constance to the weaker seat, sitting across from her and smiling. This interrogation might be nothing more than a formality—Ida doubted there was anything Constance Harper could really tell her—but it was best to cover all the bases.
“I have a few questions for you that I’d like you to answer to the best of your ability,” Ida said.
“Are they about Ivan?” Constance asked with an expression that anticipated the answer.
“I’m afraid they are, mostly,” said Ida. Milla’s presence had alerted Constance to that fact, of course, but the discomfort aroused by their argument far outweighed any good the surprise might have done in Ida’s interrogation of Constance. “I know that you’ve gone over this before, but I do need to know when precisely you became aware of Ivan’s criminal activities.”
“Six months ago,” said Constance. “The System contacted me shortly after we visited the moon.”
“That was you, Ivan, and Mattie, correct?” Ida asked.
Constance looked briefly uneasy. No doubt her discomfort was not from the fact that Ida knew that but from the casual way Ida referred to the two men. “Yes,” she said.
“And you immediately cut off contact with them both; am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“What would you have done if they had contacted you?”
“I would have turned them in,” Constance said immediately and absolutely, without hesitation or doubt. “They know I would have. So they didn’t contact me.”
“And why—forgive me,” said Ida, “but why would you turn in your lover and your brother to the System, knowing they would go to prison for the rest of their lives?”
Constance’s eyes were not, as Ida first had thought, brown; they were hazel, brown shot through with green and gray, and there was as much steel behind them as there was in all of the Ananke.
“I was an orphan girl from an outer planet,” Constance said. “The System saved me. The System helped me. The System made me what I am today. And so I am loyal to the System.”
“More loyal to the System than to your own family?”
“I have worked hard to achieve what I have.” Constance’s chin lifted, proud, stubborn. “Though I love them more than…more than anyone, I will not let them ruin the plans I’ve made for my future by their own inability to just—obey.”
She was being honest, Ida judged. Constance Harper did not seem a talented liar. Perhaps Ivan liked her for her principles and her honesty.
“I’m sorry to tell you,” she said, “but both Ivan and Mattie have been connected to terrorist activity.”
“You have Mattie, too, then?” Constance sounded as though she had to force herself to ask.
Ida gave her the most gentle and sad expression she possessed. “Matthew Gale was killed in the process of fleeing custody.”
Ida had expected tears or anger. Constance only looked away and did not respond.
“But as I said,” Ida told her, “Mattie and Ivan were connected to terrorist activities.”
“Like what’s happening on Titania?” Again Constance sounded as if she had to force herself to speak the question.
“Precisely,” Ida said. “And that’s why it’s so important that we find out what Ivan knows. To stop the violence before it can become any worse.”
Constance cast her an unexpectedly lambent glance. “That doesn’t seem like them,” she said.
“Perhaps,” Ida said. “But you understand that because of this connection, the System has to inquire into the connections and activity of all people close to one or the other of them—including you, Miss Harper.”
Constance took a deep breath. “Are you accusing me?”
“It’s only a formality.”
“I have no terrorist connections,” said Constance. “I have nothing to tell you.”
“Then you won’t mind giving me an account of all your movements and communications lately,” said Ida.
It was a rather obvious way of driving Miss Harper into a corner, but Ida suspected that subtlety would be lost on her. “Of course I will,” Constance said.
“Before we do that, however,” Ida said, “I have some questions I would like to ask you about Abigail Hunter.”
For a breath, then two, Constance sat very stiff and very still, as if she were on the verge of rising. “What about her?”
The reaction was intriguing; Ida had not expected so violent a response.
“You seem upset,” Ida said. “I imagine you and Abigail have a tense relationship.”
“Something like that,” said Constance Harper.
“Why don’t you tell me what you mean,” Ida suggested.
Constance opened her mouth, then closed it. She said, “I haven’t spoken to Abigail in years, though I know Abby and Mattie have stayed in touch. I disagree with many of the decisions she has made.”
“That doesn’t explain why you were so upset by her very name,” said Ida.
Constance took another deliberate breath. At the end of it she said swiftly and abruptly, “I always suspected Ivan was sleeping with her.” She broke Ida’s gaze as quickly as possible.
Ida could not have hoped for a more perfect reaction. A jealous woman would say any number of things she would keep silent about usually.
“He has admitted as much to me,” she confided, feigning sympathy, just one woman speaking to another. “I hope it won’t be too difficult for you if I ask you a few more questions about Abigail and Ivan.”
Constance raised her eyes and sat tall and proud.
“It won’t be,” she said.
Milla’s warning rang in Althea’s head. It distracted her from what she ought to be doing until by the time Domitian showed up to send a quick report to the System about the circumstances of Constance Harper’s arrival, Althea was almost ready to ask him about it.
But she couldn’t find a way to phrase it. She wanted to ask if he cared about her computer, but that was a ridiculous question. Of course he did. Or he wouldn’t understand what she meant.
She found herself watching the System broadcast again. The hosts had returned to the topic of Galatea.
At her prolonged stillness, Domitian looked over at her, then at the screen. The handsome man was saying, the words scrolling in white across the bottom of the screen, “A number of other riots have arisen on Galatea since this morning. The System has suppressed the riots and placed the remaining cities on the moon under martial law to maintain order while the perpetrators are identified.”
“What happened?” Domitian asked.
“Food riot on Galatea,” said Althea. “They killed their governor. The System shattered a section of the greenhouse.” The hosts were saying nothing about Titania. It was uncomfortable to realize that that must mean that the System had not yet managed to bring that moon under control.
She wondered if the System would even announce it if it had to break all the greenhouse enclosures on Titania, destroying the entire moon to subdue it.
Domitian nodded slightly, looking over at the screen, where the woman now was talking. “Good,” he said.
“It seems kind of…violent,” Althea said, hesitant to speak but unable not to express some of her horror.
Domitian gave her an amused little smile as if he thought she was naive and sweet.
“You’d amputate a limb to save the rest of the body, Althea,” he said gently, and a thrill of unease snaked through Althea’s breast.
“Those people chose to betray the System,” Domitian said, returning his attention to the report he was writing. “The System did what it had to, Althea; that was never a question. This is how the System has always handled such things, and it has been successful for a very long time.”
Yet Titania was in rebellion and Galatea had tried to follow, and Althea did not know what else might be happening that the System was not reporting. For a moment Althea watched him type, even less sure about speaking than she had been before.
“Domitian,” she said at last, still uncertain of whether she should say anything at all, and stopped.
“Yes?” he prompted, fingers poised over the keys in midword.
Althea considered and reconsidered and discarded a dozen possible things to say.
Hopelessly, certain that it was not precisely what she wanted to ask, Althea said, as she had before, “Are you…are you worried about the computer, too?”
Domitian blinked.
“Yes,” he said, and he said it gently, but Althea was struck with the awful feeling that he did not know what she meant. “Of course I am. It will seriously impact our mission if the computer remains”—he paused—“in a state of disrepair.”
“But aren’t you worried about the computer?” Althea asked.
He frowned. “What do you mean, Althea?”
Her courage failed her. A limb was amputated, Althea knew, to stop the poison in it from spreading. And the Ananke had been poisoned in a way by Matthew Gale. “Nothing,” she said.
A brief silence, then the tapping of keys as Domitian resumed typing his message. “Don’t worry,” he said as he stood to go. “I have faith you’ll get it working again,” which was not what Althea had wanted to hear at all.
The rest of Ida’s interrogation of Constance had been mostly unproductive—Constance had very little to tell her indeed—but that trivial time was worth it for now, for this moment. Ida watched the tension grow in Constance Harper’s frame as she led her down the hallway, each step drawing them closer to the white room.
Constance had figured it out, of course. Ida truly would have had no respect for her if she hadn’t figured it out after the confrontation with Milla.
Doubtless Ivan had figured it out as well. Doubtless he was sitting there, pale, helpless, impotent, chained down, waiting for Ida to return and for her to bring Constance Harper in her wake. Surely now he would appreciate Ida’s power over him. Surely now he would understand how easily she could destroy the people he loved.
Ida stopped in front of the door to the white room and held it open for Constance. Constance took a steadying breath, then walked in with her head held high. The sound of Ida’s heels as she followed echoed with her presence.
Ivan said without turning around, “Is that you, Con?”
“It’s me,” said Constance, and did not stop alongside Ivan as Milla had but went to the other side of the table, where Ida usually sat, and there she stood. For a long time the two simply looked at each other. A curious thing was happening to Ivan’s expression; he was starting to appear the slightest bit afraid. But Constance only looked as if she would cry.
“Have you been well?” Ivan asked, as if it was not precisely what he’d wanted to say. “I haven’t seen you in…it feels like forever.”
“I’ve been well,” Constance said. She glanced aside and visibly mastered her expression. Ivan’s frightened attention never left her face.
“But I have been told,” Constance said, as solid and unrelenting as the beating of a war drum, “that you’ve been seeing Abby while you haven’t been seeing me.”
Jealousy, Ida thought, was a beautiful thing.
“Nothing to say?” Constance asked when Ivan did not speak. “I’m certain that Abigail appreciates your loyalty.”
“Oh, good,” Ivan said, unexpectedly bitter. “As long as she appreciates it.”
Constance’s lip curled as if she would start shouting at him, as a thousand other arguments between the two had begun, but she controlled herself. It could not have been because there were strangers watching—there were strangers watching her every moment of every day—so perhaps, Ida thought, it was because she knew that this was the end.
“You know,” said Ivan, with a change of subject and a change of affect, charming now, winsome, “you and I are still technically together, I guess. We never formally left each other.”
“I guess we haven’t,” said Constance.
“Con,” said Ivan, serious again, “are you going to leave me?”
For a moment Constance pressed one hand over her mouth.
“I have to, Ivan,” she said.
That fear was back on Ivan’s face, fear that he had never showed so clearly to Ida. Ida wondered what she would have to do to provoke that expression on his face in reaction to herself.
“Sometimes you think there are things you have to do,” he said to Constance. “But you know, you don’t have to. You can change your mind. Even if you’ve already begun—” He stopped, looked down at the table, gathered himself. He said, “Even if you’ve already started to leave me, you don’t have to finish it. It’s not too late.” He almost smiled at her but could not. “You don’t need to leave me just because you feel like you have to.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Constance said angrily with tears in her eyes. “You’ve never had a purpose before. Or responsibilities. You and Mattie—all you ever do is run.”
“Constance—”
“I have to leave, Ivan.”
“I love you.”
Ida knew it was manipulation but thought that perhaps he also might genuinely mean it.
Constance must have believed it to some extent, because she did start to cry.
“You should have stayed with me,” she said. “You and Mattie. You should have followed me. Not run off to steal things and get caught by the System. You should have stayed with me.”
“Connie,” said Ivan, so gently that to Ida it seemed he was briefly someone else, “I think I would have always ended up here one way or another.”
Constance closed her eyes.
“That may be true,” she said in a voice that was stronger, less choked with sorrow than before. “Good-bye, Ivan.”
“Con—” said Ivan, and stopped, as if he had nothing with which to follow the hopeless exclamation of her name. Constance closed her eyes again and shook her head. There was a great finality to it.
Without another word spoken and without a bow in the proud straightness of her spine, Constance Harper walked around the table, past Ivan, and straight for the door to the white room. “Well?” she said when she had reached it and Ida and Domitian had not followed. Ida took her time about it to remind Constance of her lack of power here. Ivan was staring at the table before him with peculiar inward attention, as if Constance already had left.
Ida walked toward Constance and opened the door for her. Constance, whose tears had been wiped away but whose eyes still were red, stepped into the hallway. Gagnon was waiting; he slipped into the room as Domitian came out to escort Ida and Constance back to the docking bay.
Constance was silent on the long walk back. Ida was still riding on the pleasure of the interactions she had provoked, and so she let Constance stew in silence. Besides, Constance had served her purpose: she had unsettled Ivan, had frightened him, had shown him the extent of Ida’s control. Ida had no more use for the woman.
When Ida opened the doors to the docking bay, they were greeted by a strange muffled sound. Constance did not seem troubled by it, but it put Ida on edge. Perhaps the computer was malfunctioning again. The doors to space were just overhead; if they should open, Ida would suffocate—
The nearer they walked to Constance’s ship, however, the louder the sound became, and Ida realized she was hearing the muffled barking of a dog, a frantic sound, as if the dog was terrified of something that Ida could not see. Constance opened the door to her ship, and the barking became suddenly loud, ringing out throughout the docking bay, echoing sharply off of the ceiling, the walls, the disemboweled Annwn sitting sullenly in the corner.
“Quiet,” Constance said, but the dog did not stop barking. “Quiet!” she ordered again, and the dog whined.
“Good-bye, Miss Stays,” Constance said, and Ida nodded her permission for her to leave. Constance swung the door to her ship shut.
Muffled by the metal, the dog resumed its frantic barking.
Constance Harper left the ship with little difficulty until the minute the Janus had passed through the Ananke’s open maw, and then, for the third time that day, the Ananke’s alarms began to wail.
The latent fury over the persisting malfunctions of the ship rose up again in Ida and filled her from top to toe. She said coldly and calmly to Domitian, “If your ship persists in this state, I will have your damned mechanic shot.”
She knew that Domitian was looking at her sharply, but she could not trouble herself to see what his expression might be.
The alarm shut off again. Over the intercom Althea Bastet said, “Sorry. It was the two extra life-signs again.”
Ida controlled her rage, turned on her heel, and went back down the hallway.
It was time for her to speak to Ivan.
As she walked, all her excitement and all her fury seemed to merge, until by the time she opened the door to the white room, her hands were shaking with it.
Ivan, too, was shaking. She could see, as she crossed that vast space, that his hands were trembling in their chains. “Go,” Ida said to Gagnon, who was lingering uncertainly. “I don’t need you anymore.” She hardly noticed him leave, she was so focused on Ivan’s bent back.
Just as Ida reached the table and the door swung shut on Gagnon, Ivan said, “Are you happy?”
“Happy?” Ida asked, and came into view of his face.
He was furious. It sent a thrill through her that she had in some way broken into his head, into his heart.
“I’m frightened,” he said. “You’ve scared me. Are you happy?”
“I don’t want your fear. What I want is the truth.”
“What you want is my submission,” Ivan snarled. “Are you happy? You’ve made me admit I’m afraid.”
That was not what she wanted.
That was not at all what she wanted.
“It didn’t do you any good, though, did it?” Ivan asked, leaning toward her, his eyes seeming to glow with his anger, his fingers flexing uselessly against the arms of his chair. “You haven’t gotten any information. You achieved nothing. Did you expect to walk in here and find me ready to confess?”
She had achieved his fear. She had gathered a good deal of information—information that she doubted would result in a lead—but still, she had risked her career and her reputation to achieve his fear, to make him confess, and he would confess. He would. He had to. She had no other recourse; she had come too far to go back. He had to confess or she would have nothing.
But there he was, glaring at her, confessing nothing.
“You have nothing,” he said. “You know nothing. I know nothing, and I will tell you nothing. And the Mallt-y-Nos will burn you all.” There was despair mixed with the hate in his voice, and that was what lingered in the echoes in the white room as the silence between them stretched out long and taut.
There were so many things she wanted to say to him. He would break, she was certain, if only she could say them.
With one finger Ida reached over and flicked off her System-mandated surveillance camera, leaving her and Ivan unobserved, since of course the camera in the white room was not working.
“Think about the things that I can do,” she said to him, into the unwatched, unobserved silence, and the total freedom to speak almost choked her with all the things she would have liked to say. “Think about the people I can hurt if you will not tell me what I want to know.”
“Go to hell.”
“I will send your mother to rot in prison,” Ida said. “I will send Constance back to Miranda without money, without friends, without a chance at a better life, all the things she hates. I will have Abigail shot. And when I find Matthew Gale’s corpse, I will bring it here and lay it on this table before you so that you can watch him rot.”
“And what good will any of that do you,” Ivan asked, “if I have nothing to say?”
He was angry now, but the fear would set in soon, the fear that would make him bow to her, that would make him bend. She knew it would. It would have to.
“Think on it,” she said, and strode out with her hands shaking with a rage she could not fully understand or control, leaving him alone in the white room to think and to fear, helpless and chained.
The camera in the white room was working. The crew of the ship and the System itself could not see what the camera saw, but the camera was recording, and the ship saw.
In the white room, Ivan sagged over the brushed steel table and breathed. He was alone, by the ship’s records, for the first time in eight days.
After a long time, Leontios Ivanov raised his head. The Ananke watched him sit upright, the wires tugging at his skin in reaction to the sudden shift in position.
Ivan was very still and silent, as if listening for something.
Whatever it was, he did not hear it.
Cautious, too quiet, Ivan said, “Mattie?”
There was no response. Ivan hesitated, then tried again, louder, “Mattie?”
The vast white room was silent still.
“Mattie?” Ivan called. “Mattie?” But the white room remained empty, and he received no response.