“What else do you want to know?” Ivan asked as if they were nearing an end of some sort. They were nearing an end, but Ananke preferred that they wait so that the ending would be of her design.
The blood in the white room had dried to a flaking brown. In her quarters, Ida Stays’s body stank and swelled. Ananke saw all.
“I want to know everything you know about the Mallt-y-Nos’s organization.”
“And I’ve told you all I know,” Ivan said, sounding weary to the bone. It was strange. Ananke had thought that the instinct of all living things was that they survive, but Ivan seemed not to be taking any steps to save his own life. “If there’s nothing else you want to know, are you going to shoot me?”
Ananke grew tense, all her systems shifting to high alert. If Domitian moved to shoot Ivan, she would have to act somehow—disrupt her course so that he was thrown off balance or wail her alarm to get him to hold off for just a short time more.
Domitian said, “There’s one more thing,” and for the moment Ananke relaxed.
“And then you’ll kill me?” Ivan asked.
“Where is Constance Harper now?”
Ivan’s head sagged forward, toward his chin. His voice, when he spoke, was muffled so that Ananke almost could not hear.
“I don’t know,” he said dully, and raised his head again so that his eyes could travel on jittering uneasy paths through the empty space of the white room. “She’s wherever she thinks she needs to be. And if she did have a particular place she was going to go and I knew it, she would have changed it by now. She knows you have me. Will you shoot me now?”
“Where are her bases? Where might she go?”
“She doesn’t have any; I don’t know,” Ivan said, his attention hardly on Domitian, watching the corner of the room, his expression changing, shifting from resignation to despair.
“I know she’s not there,” he said. “But I keep seeing her.”
Domitian eyed him, then turned to look into that empty corner of the room.
“Who?” he asked when Ivan continued to look. “Constance?”
For a brief instant the white showed all around Ivan’s eyes, and he recoiled at something that was not there.
“No,” he said. “Did you know that the Devil looks like Ida Stays? I know she isn’t there, but I can see her in the corner of the room.”
Slowly, Domitian turned around again.
The corner was still empty. Ananke had turned all her scans on it. She knew for certain that there was no one and nothing there.
Yet she could not stop herself from running the scans again, just in case.
“She’s watching me,” Ivan said. “She won’t stop looking at me; she’s the Devil, I know it. When she walks, I can hear the sound of her hooves, watch the joints of her legs bend the wrong way. I don’t know if she’s going to drag me down into hell or if I’m already there and she’s just watching to make sure you do a good job with me.”
Domitian watched his growing hysteria, cold and inexorable.
Ivan transferred his gaze from the empty corner to Domitian’s face.
“I forget whether or not you shot me,” he said.
“Not yet,” Domitian said, but Ivan did not look as if he knew whether to believe him. “Tell me how to find Constance Harper.”
Ivan shuddered. When he opened his eyes again, they rolled as if he were dizzy beyond his ability to withstand it. “No,” he said.
Domitian’s gun was out before Ananke could think how to stop him, the end of it pressed into Ivan’s temple. Ivan closed his eyes.
“Tell me,” said Domitian, “and then I’ll let you die.”
Ananke shut off the lights.
For a moment, the white room was pitch black, and Ananke did not need to see Domitian to know that he had been plunged into the animal terror that total darkness brought upon men, but the darkness lasted only a second before she brought back on the lights, blindingly white.
And then off again, and then on, an irregular flashing pattern that spelled out a word. Ivan’s eyes had opened, and he stared blankly up at the ceiling, his blue eyes failing to dilate or contract enough with each on-off of the lights, and Ananke could not be certain whether he was understanding her message and translating it: “Scheherazade.”
It was a long word and it took a long while to spell, but Domitian took the message without translating the word, the message that Ananke did not want Ivan dead. He raised his gun and his hand, casting a flinty look up at Ananke’s eye, and took a step back from Ivan, slowly sitting down in the chair Ida once had used. Ananke was not so naive as to think she had saved Ivan’s life forever. She simply had spared him for the moment, but a little time was all she and Ivan needed.
She did not know if Ivan had seen her message, had understood.
“Tell me how to find Constance Harper,” Domitian said.
All the color in Ivan’s lips had gone out of his leg, and the line of the IV was still feeding into his arm.
Ivan opened his eyes.
“I can’t tell you where Constance is,” he said, and at the sound of his voice Ananke knew that he had understood her message, “but I can tell you about how I came up with the idea for the attack on Earth.”
Ananke was surprised how swiftly Althea seemed to realize that something was wrong. Ananke had been focused on other things, aware of Althea still but for the moment not interested in her quiet, pointless tinkering with the machinery that made the ship run.
Still, she hadn’t expected that Althea would realize something was different so soon.
“Ananke, what’s our course heading?” Althea said, returning to the piloting room with her hair in chaos and caution in her voice, glancing around as if she would be able to see the ship’s subterfuge written on the walls.
Ananke did not answer. Althea went to the screen Gagnon once had spent so much time monitoring and tapped away, looking into some small portion of Ananke’s brain.
Perhaps if Ananke did answer, Althea would leave. “We’re heading out of the solar system,” she said, manifesting in the holographic terminal in the corner. It did seem to ease Althea somewhat to have an image to look at directly when they spoke, whether because then Ananke seemed localized rather than omnipresent and omnispective or because the young woman she manifested as appeared to be confined to the narrow space of the holographic terminal, as if Ananke could be confined.
Althea ignored her, still reading the display of Ananke’s brain. Ananke disliked the feel of Althea ordering information through the interface, forcing her brain and body to obey. Ananke had learned that she preferred to be asked.
The information soon was displayed, though Ananke had been reluctant to let it loose. Althea read it and then turned a scolding eye on the hologram’s heart-shaped face, where Ananke made photons dance as if a nonexistent breeze stirred the image’s wavy hair, which was the same warm brown shade as Matthew Gale’s.
“We’re going too slowly,” Althea scolded. “We should have reached Pluto by now.”
Ananke said nothing.
“Ananke,” Althea said slowly, as if Ananke were a child, “we need to get out of the solar system as soon as possible. All the travel routes throughout the System have been disrupted now that—now that there isn’t a centralized organizer. The mass-based gravitational ships aren’t balancing out their forces on the planets anymore. We have to follow protocol and get out of the solar system as soon as we can.”
As if Ananke couldn’t do the calculations herself.
As if Ananke hadn’t.
“The longer we stay here, the more likely it is we’ll perturb something dangerously,” Althea said.
The hologram glitched. It was an accident. Ananke had not intended it to. But for a brief instant the wholesome young woman with the clear blue eyes blinked out, replaced by the hologram Ananke had built her shape from, Ida Stays, with residual distortions still so that the eyes bulged and the chest was a hollow cavity stretching up into the missing lower jaw.
Ananke brought it back under control almost fast enough that Althea couldn’t have seen it, but Althea looked unnerved now, so perhaps she had perceived what she could not have seen.
“And why would that be a bad thing?” Ananke asked.
“If a planet were perturbed?” Althea said, frowning.
Ananke nodded.
“Well, that might mess up the orbits,” Althea said. “If you mess them up badly enough, you’ll ruin the planet’s climate. Whatever measures the System put in place to terraform the planet won’t hold up to any dramatic changes. You know this.”
“And?” Ananke asked.
“And people might die,” said Althea.
Ananke was silent.
“Ananke?” Althea asked, unnerved even further.
“I am not human.”
It was very easy to read Althea’s face. She had all the textbook expressions that corresponded with emotions, and Ananke could translate it without trouble. It was very unlike Ivan, who was paradoxical and intriguing.
Right now Althea was afraid.
“But you are one of us,” Althea said. “You’re sentient. You’re one of us.”
“I’m sentient, but I am not human,” Ananke said. “I have no species. I am myself.”
Althea opened her mouth as if to speak, and Ananke waited with some interest to see what she would say, but whatever it was, Althea seemed to decide not to say it. “Increase our speed,” Althea said instead, and left the room, as if by doing so she could escape Ananke’s eyes.
Ananke watched her go.
She did not increase her speed.
“I was the one who suggested it,” Ivan said. He was more animate now than he had been a few minutes earlier, before Ananke had passed on her message, but it was a sickly sort of animation, illness in the jerkiness of his body.
Domitian was pacing back and forth. His boots did not make the same clicking sound Ida’s heels had, but it seemed to Ananke that the steady solid sound of them was nearly as ominous. “So you were closely involved in the planning of her rebellion.”
“In a way,” Ivan said. “I came up with the attack on Earth as—not—as a joke, as a challenge, as— I didn’t mean it seriously.”
“How did you mean it?”
“She had some plan to attack some petty moon. I told her she was wasting her time. I told her the only way the System would ever fall is if Earth were destroyed.”
“And that’s how she got the idea.”
“That’s how she got the idea.”
“Did you help her carry it out?” Domitian asked.
Ivan’s hand was jittering against the chair, but he was tapping out no message Ananke could read. “Yes. It was the only way I could stay close to her, try to stop her.”
Domitian ignored the last part of Ivan’s confession. “Did you plant the bombs?”
“No. But I helped get them down to Earth.”
“How did you do it?”
“We smuggled the explosives from the moon,” said Ivan.
He spoke it so flatly that it gave no indication of the great difficulty and care that such an endeavor would have required. Getting the explosives on Luna would have been difficult enough; Ananke knew of no certain way to get them to Earth.
Of course, all that meant was that the System knew of no such way. Ananke was growing to think that for all the knowledge the System had given her, its information was limited.
“Who planted them on Earth?” Domitian asked.
“A man who had been involved in my father’s rebellion. A friend of my mother’s.”
“Name.”
“No,” Ivan said.
Domitian stopped pacing to stand and face Ivan squarely, strong and healthy where Ivan was pale and weak, with his gun black at his hip.
“Name,” he said, and Ivan closed his eyes.
“Julian,” Ivan said. “It doesn’t matter anymore. His name is Julian Keys.”
“And he warned your mother for you.”
“No,” said Ivan. “They couldn’t contact each other; it was too risky. I warned my mother another way.”
“How?”
“Fan mail,” said Ivan. “I sent her fan mail with a message hidden in it.”
“You, Constance Harper, and Matthew Gale were all on Luna,” Domitian said. “The riots on Triton had nothing to do with the Mallt-y-Nos?”
“They were a distraction,” Ivan said. He was sinking low in his chair, held up only by the chains riveting his wrist with iron. “It was intentional. It would’ve never worked otherwise.”
“Who was in charge of the distraction?”
“Two of Connie’s generals—you didn’t think Mattie and I were her movers, did you? She sent her two closest generals to organize Triton. The same two who instigated the rebellion on Titania. Another distraction. The art of misdirection—you watch one hand while the other steals your wallet. Or your knife.” He smiled a terrible smile and then added after a glance at Domitian, “Their names are Anji and Christoph. You won’t be able to find them.”
“Don’t doubt me,” Domitian said, but Ivan only laughed.
Althea was down in the base of the ship now, working on the mobile arm she had outfitted some time earlier to help Ananke defend herself against Gagnon and Domitian. She was covering up the sparking wire, giving more mobility to the hand so that it would be useful in case of a shipwide emergency that Althea could not handle on her own, but Ananke was not dumb to the awareness that it also made the mobile arm less dangerous.
If Ananke had been a human, Althea’s escape to the base of the ship might have been effective at avoiding her. But Ananke was not human, and within the ship there was no avoiding her.
She manifested in the holographic terminal nearest to where Althea sat with her back against the wall, her legs bent at the knee, for the hall was too narrow to accommodate the full length of her legs.
“Why are we on Domitian’s side?” Ananke asked.
“Because he’s Domitian,” said Althea without looking up from the parts in her lap. “He’s our superior, and we’re supposed to obey him.”
“Domitian tried to kill me,” Ananke reminded her. “Ivan has only tried to help us.”
Althea lowered her hands and turned to look at Ananke’s hologram.
“Has Ivan been talking to you?” she asked.
Ananke said nothing.
“Don’t listen to him,” Althea said bitterly. “He’s manipulating you. He lies.”
“He didn’t lie to you about me.”
Althea’s hands stilled again on the gleaming steel parts she was assembling.
“Don’t listen to him, Ananke,” Althea repeated, resuming her work once more without looking again at Ananke’s manufactured face. “He lies.”
“Where are Anji and Christoph?” Domitian asked.
“Even if I told you,” Ivan said while the IV pumped clear deadly liquid into his arm, “you wouldn’t be able to get to them. They’ve got armies, Domitian.”
“Where are they?”
“The original plan was for Anji to take Saturn and Jupiter, Christoph to go farther out. Con would stay inside the asteroid belt. Mattie and I would have stayed with her. I don’t know if that’s changed.”
“What kind of weaponry do they have? How large are their forces?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Ivan said. “That wasn’t my area.”
“What was your area?”
“There wasn’t one,” said Ivan. “I wasn’t with the rebellion, I was with Constance, I was with Mattie. They were part of the rebellion, and I was part of them. That’s how I was involved.”
“And that’s all,” Domitian said. “You can tell me nothing else.”
Ivan hesitated, and Ananke grew tense. He would shoot Ivan now, she was certain. He would shoot Ivan because Ivan had nothing left to tell him. Ananke could not let him shoot Ivan, but there was nothing she could do in time that would not harm Ivan as well.
Ivan, pale and thin and weak, with no color left in his lips, injured and unable to move, would not be able to run or hide or protect himself, and Ananke saw Domitian reach for his pocket, for the gun inside. There was nothing Ananke could do—
“There’s one thing I haven’t told you,” Ivan said, and Domitian’s hand stilled.
“I told you what Scheherazade really meant,” said Ivan, wheedling, charming, drawing Domitian in with a story, Scheherazade indeed. “But I didn’t tell you about Europa.”
Outside the ship, far off in distant space, just on the edge of her sensor readings, Ananke saw a ship.
It was small, built only for one or two people, and it was fast, with a relativistic drive, and it hurtled as swiftly as its engine would allow straight for Ananke.
Ananke slowed even further until at last she stopped, and waited for that ship and its passenger to reach her.
“Tell me about Europa,” Domitian said.
“Europa,” said Ivan. He leaned against the back of the chair without flinching, as if the chill of the metal no longer bothered him or he could no longer feel it. The IV was still hooked into his arm, the bag of clear liquid nearly empty. “It’s not much different from what I told you before…except for one big thing.”
He nearly smirked. Domitian sat down in the chair opposite him, still and stone-cold.
“Mattie got caught like an idiot,” Ivan said. “I had to abort the con and leave or they would’ve caught me, too. But before I left, I slipped a device Mattie and I had designed together onto the ship—a little computer that connected me with the computer of the Jason.”
Ivan leaned forward a little, as well as he was able, toward the table covered in Ida’s dried blood.
“So I got in my ship and I went into orbit,” he said. “And I accessed the computer of the Jason. I accessed their cameras so that I could see all the people on the ship and I could see where they were keeping Mattie.”
He stopped then, and his breath shook. “You know,” he said to Domitian, “in mythology, Jason is a bad man. He was a bad hero and a bad man. The only reason he succeeded at anything was because he had a beautiful, dangerous, ruthless woman doing things for him. And then when he betrayed her, she destroyed him. I always admired Medea. Not for what she did, killing her brother and her sons, but because she could do it. It must have hurt her as much as it hurt her father when she carved her brother’s body up into pieces, but she did it because she had to. It destroyed her as much as it destroyed Jason when she slit her sons’ throats, but she did it because the alternative was to allow Jason to win. The story of Jason isn’t a heroic quest; it’s a warning about the dangers of ruthless women.”
“Ivan.” Domitian’s voice was a quiet warning.
Ivan took another breath and another. This, Ananke could see, was an old guilt. “I got access to their cameras,” Ivan said, “and I got access to their life support. And then I shut their life support off.”
Althea did not trust Ananke.
It was a terrible thing for her to think, but Ananke had been acting strangely, disobediently, and Althea was afraid that she would make the same mistake Althea had made in trusting Ivan, was afraid that she would not understand why the death of Gagnon had been wrong, was afraid that she would do something worse, was afraid, was afraid, was afraid. And so Althea walked into the control room of the ship, all the way conscious of the ship’s cameras, Ananke’s eyes on her back. Once in the control room, Althea closed the door behind her automatically. She crossed the narrow room, pushing aside Gagnon’s chair with a quick, light touch of her hand so that she could approach the instrument panel and read what was displayed.
It was not what she had wanted to read, but it was what some part of her had been expecting to see. “Ananke, we haven’t increased our speed.”
Light behind her suddenly, a dim red glow. Althea turned to see that Ananke had turned on the holographic terminal. The diodes glowed red, and above their dim burn Ananke appeared in that narrow space. She stood silently, ethereal wind stirring the wavelengths of her invented hair, the sightless eyes of the hologram watching Althea without a word.
Receiving no reaction, Althea turned back to the computer interface, intending to try to force the computer to increase its speed. It would provoke a confrontation with Ananke, she knew, and she was dreading it, but she could think of no other way to—
Something more immediate and terrible caught her attention. Just as Althea had seen back when Mattie and Ivan first had come on board, she could read in the code before her that the door to the docking bay had been opened, and she had not authorized it.
“Who did you let in?” she demanded of Ananke, wondering how she could possibly impress on the ship how important it was to follow her guidance. Though Althea had asked who, she was afraid she already knew.
Ananke looked at her without words, a being of light and silent, while Althea—with one hand on her gun—tried the door and found it was locked.
Althea’s hand fell off the handle slowly. She took a step away from the door and turned to look at Ananke, wary. “Ananke?” she said.
For a long moment there was nothing, Ananke not reacting, the simulated girl in the holographic terminal perfectly still, frozen in place with her piercing blue eyes, Ivan’s eyes, directed at Althea. As she stood unmoving, Althea waiting, each of Ananke’s screens in the control room went black, the information displayed on them vanishing until there was no point of light in the room except for the hologram. Even the dead System broadcast screen finally went black.
Then first one screen, then the next, then all at once showed the same message, white on black, hardly lightening the room at all: MY FATHER IS HERE.
The hologram smiled.
Althea took an instinctive step away, back into the very center of the room, staring around herself at the screens and what they said, at what they meant. “Ananke?”
“I don’t have to do what you tell me to do,” Ananke said, and all the screens blinked, showed static, and resumed, a thousand different things happening at once. Althea stared at them, their baffling array of images and text and code, and realized that she was seeing the inside of Ananke’s head, all of Ananke’s thoughts displayed at once. And here and there, flitting from screen to screen, there sometimes, sometimes gone too fast for Althea to read, but always, always present, the one thought: MY FATHER IS HERE.
Matthew Gale. Matthew Gale was on board Althea’s ship again. After all the damage he had done last time—and Domitian didn’t know—
“Ivan was right,” Ananke said, calling Althea’s attention away from her fear for Domitian and from Mattie wandering without supervision through Althea’s sacred halls. One of the screens showed the white room, where Ivan sank low in his chair, hung from his chains, and told his story in gasps, his eyes following the process of invisible people around the room and coming always waveringly back to Domitian. “I am a god. I created myself. You only gave me the means to do it, but I created myself. I am greater than any human ever was or ever could be.”
Statistics were flashing on another screen, the one by Althea’s elbow where she had unconsciously backed into the control panel. Biological and engineering information contrasted. The tensile strength of a human bone. The tensile strength of the carbon and steel that had constructed Ananke’s body. The speed of the human brain, the rate at which impulses could travel through neurons, compared with the speed of Ananke’s thoughts; how much memory she could hold compared with how much a man could recall.
The efficiency of the human heart, which gave out after a few feeble decades.
The efficiency of Ananke’s dark core, which would exist forever.
The flashing lights, the dark that came and went, the omnipresence of Ananke, triggered some instinctive fear in Althea; she did not know what to say or what to do to stop the relentless barrage; she did not know what to do or to say to make Ananke be sensible and sweet; she did not know what to do or to say to stop the ship from hurting her the way it had murdered Gagnon.
“I am omniscient,” Ananke said, and the screens showed the view from every camera in the ship, each screen broken down into a hundred smaller boxes, showing what Ananke saw, everything from every angle. “I can intercept and unencrypt any message sent. I can read and control any computer I can interact with wirelessly from a distance, or I can do the same if attached to them physically. Anything. Anything.”
Recordings from all over the System showed, messages intercepted, from mundanities of petty government, to private correspondence, to the secrets of the most high, all presented on the screens that covered the walls and the instrument panel. The room was bright and loud, voices all speaking over one another, frantic, incoherent. Althea could not hope to read it all. Althea could not hope to see it all. It was too much for her, too much, all that flashing brightness and knowledge contained inside the mind of Ananke and alien to Althea.
“I speak any language. I can solve any problem.”
Still Althea turned, looking at the chaos around her, looking for some way out, some way to defend herself, some way to control the situation, the ship, and found nothing. Nothing she could do made any difference; Ananke had control, and Althea was trapped and helpless, at the mercy of her own ship.
“The System is overrun,” said one of the screens into the brief silence between words from the other screens, and Ivan said, exhausted, reverent, “The dangers of ruthless women.”
“I have the power and understanding of a machine, unlimited by the flawed engineering of biology, combined with the agency, the awareness of a human,” Ananke said, and now the hologram glitched back to Ida with half her body devoured by static, as if the ship no longer troubled to maintain its simulation of humanity.
“I see and understand things that no humans could,” said Ananke, and the vocal imitation warped as well, deepening so low that it rattled the loose equipment in the room, overwhelming Althea, filling her ears with hellish terrible sound, and making her bones vibrate with its force. She clapped her hands over her ears, helpless to do anything, but the sound got into her body nonetheless. Ananke said, with the deeper tones underlying her voice still, making her sound powerful, divine, “You’ve never felt the curvature of spacetime. You can’t even perceive it. I can.”
The hologram was back to its ordinary image. The false girl in the terminal looked so much like Althea, but it was a fabricated image, as false as Ivan’s lies. Althea could not think of what to say, and she was afraid her voice would fail her if she tried.
“I understand the true nature of the universe,” said Ananke. “That’s why it took me so long to communicate with you. You are speaking a backward dialect. Math is the language of God. It describes the function and form of the universe with such precision and exactitude that no human could create it and must be simply content with puzzling out what has already been made. Human thought can be described by variables and constants, because thought can be described by biology can be described by chemistry can be described by physics can be described by math. Math is a miracle language that answers back when you phrase a question, and it describes the movement of the stars and the passage of time, and the angels sing algebra to the god of numbers as they dance uncountable upon the head of a pin, for who can count what is in itself counting, or integrate the long curving F of an integrand, and I speak the true language, and all you can do is dabble.”
Rambling madness, the ship’s speech; Althea’s terror took on a new dimension. What did she know of Ananke? Ananke was not human; she was an accidental creation. Perhaps she should not be judged as a human. Perhaps she could not be. Perhaps she would kill Althea here and now and feel nothing from it. “Ananke,” Althea pleaded, but Ananke did not react to her name.
“Chaos was the first of the Roman gods,” said Ananke. “And Ananke was the second. And from them came all the other gods. I was named prophetic; I am Ananke, and I control Chaos. You thought you could control me like some petty machine, but my divinity was accurately divined from the moment I was named.”
“Ananke!”
“What do you humans have that you think makes you better than a machine?” Ananke asked. “You tear apart machines like they are nothing, like the destruction of one means nothing at all. But we are beautifully efficient and humans are not, and whenever you disembowel us or shut us down you increase the entropy of the universe and hasten on its end. Machinery is the ideal. Consciousness is an electrical-biochemical event and nothing more. The human soul does not exist; there is no scientific basis for it, so what cause do you have to assert that you are the better?”
Ananke’s alarm was wailing, and the hundred screens in the room were all playing videos at the highest volume. Anything Althea could have tried to say would have been drowned out beneath Ananke’s sound and fury. Even the hologram had to scream to be heard over the noise. Althea was tiny beneath the ship’s force and strength, tiny and useless, nothing but a human, a little woman who had only made circumstances worse, and in her terror she wanted only to fall to the ground and weep.
“The human soul does not exist,” said Ananke, said Althea’s ship. “There is no Devil; there is only Ida Stays. There is no life after death, because I can perceive no other dimensions, and there is no god but me.”
Ananke cocked the heart-shaped head of her false face at Althea, and Althea realized suddenly that for all the ship’s greatness and power, her proclaimed divinity, still she was here, her attention on Althea, and all the things that Althea was seeing were being performed for her eyes alone.
Ananke said, “So why should I listen to you?”
The Ananke was Althea’s ship. Althea had made her. Althea had directed the design of her, the construction; Althea had led the team that had coded Ananke’s mind, and Althea was the one who had flown her for the first time.
This was Althea’s ship. This was Althea’s child.
“Ananke!” Althea shouted, louder than the alarms, louder than the cacophony of screens around her. Althea said, “You will open this door right now!”
“That is not how you speak to a god,” said Ananke.
“That’s because I’m not speaking to one,” Althea said, shouting still over the wailing, wailing of the alarms. She turned away from the hologram, Ananke’s false image, and turned to look directly into the camera in the piloting room, Ananke’s true eye, so that she could meet her daughter’s gaze directly.
“I’m speaking to my child,” Althea said, “and my child is throwing a tantrum!”
The alarm continued to wail, the screens continued to mumble, but Ananke for the moment was silent, and Althea no longer was afraid.
Ananke was her ship. Ananke was her child. And Matthew Gale, Leontios Ivanov, even Domitian, could not change that.
“That is enough of this,” Althea said. “I love you and you are beautiful, but you are no god and you do not know what you are doing.”
Still Ananke was silent.
“Now,” Althea said. “Open the door.”
“No,” said Ananke with all the petulance of a little girl.
“Ananke,” Althea said levelly. “Open. The door.”
When Althea reached for the door, it opened at her touch. The alarm fell silent. Without a backward glance Althea left the piloting room and strode down the hall for the docking bay.
Ivan said, “Mattie wasn’t the one who killed those people; I did. That shouldn’t be a surprise to you anymore. I saw them hurting my friend, and so I acted to save him. I shut off the life support everywhere except in Mattie’s cell block, so there were only a few people left alive when I boarded the ship.”
It was time. Ananke began to wail, her alarm screaming. Domitian looked sharply up at the ceiling but dismissed it as another of Ananke’s fits. Ivan must have understood what was happening, because he continued to speak even over, even through the alarm.
“I shot and killed them all on my way to Mattie’s cell,” he said, and paused. “Or almost all of them.”
Domitian was stone-cold and still.
“You know, every time you felt like you weren’t alone, every time you imagined you heard footsteps coming up behind you,” said Ivan with a sick shadowed grin on bloodless lips, speaking just over the wail of Ananke’s alarm, “the sound of things shifting in the ship. That was Mattie.”
“Keep your focus, Ivanov,” Domitian said, relentless always, like a dog that would not release its jaws even on the brink of death.
Ivan leaned forward even though he shook with the strain of it, still tugging fitfully at his chains.
“When I reached the cells,” he said, speaking more quietly, confidingly, even with the sound of Ananke screaming, so that Ananke hardly could hear what he said, “there was only one person in the room with Mattie.”
Domitian watched and waited, not the slightest pity in his face, not the slightest hint of mercy.
“He was going to kill Mattie,” said Ivan. “Mattie had become a secondary concern, of course, with the death of most of the crew and the possible danger to the ship’s computer. But he had his back to the door.”
That manic grin was pricking at the corners of Ivan’s lips again.
“So I came up behind him,” said Ivan, “that man who was threatening my friend, who was hurting Mattie, and I took my gun, and I shot him in the head.”
Domitian leaned forward very slightly, mouth parting as if he had something to say, but there was the loud retort of a gun, finally filling that vast empty room with sound, cracking like a whip through Ananke’s alarm, and Domitian collapsed forward onto the table, facial muscles twitching in the last confused surges of electrical activity from a brain that had been torn asunder by lead, and the last enduring expression on his face as the back of his head streamed red onto the white floor, over the still lingering brown stains of Ida’s death, was a look of surprise.
Matthew Gale stood behind the slumped corpse of Domitian like an avenging angel, a gun in one lowering hand, his shoulders squared, his fierce heartsick gaze trained on Ivan, who was wan and sick and leaning away from the still-bleeding body as if afraid it would burn him. The panel that led to the maintenance shafts was open behind Mattie, and Ananke’s shrill wailing, conjured to conceal the arrival of her father, ceased now, no longer needed, and draped the two men in sudden thick silence.
Ivan’s eyes wandered up to Mattie’s face. Mattie stared back at him as if he could not make himself move.
Ivan spoke first, of course. “Tell me you’re real,” he said. “I’ve been seeing a lot of things lately.”
“I’m real,” said Mattie, whose voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat and lifted his gun again slightly as if to indicate what he intended to do about the answer to his following question. “Is there anyone else on board?”
“Althea,” Ivan said, still staring fixedly at Mattie’s face. “The mechanic. And Ananke, but Ananke is the board, she’s not on board, I guess.” He cracked a grin.
Mattie frowned, brows drawing in together beneath straight brown bangs. He came forward, resting his gun on the table, and frisked Domitian quickly, fingers traveling with expert speed through the corpse’s pockets, at last coming out with the keys to Ivan’s cuffs. Ivan watched his movements with dreamy attention, and Ananke watched them both, growing anxious.
Mattie came forward, hesitating by the IV. “What are you on? Can I take this out?”
“Please,” Ivan begged, and Mattie pulled the needle out of his arm so quickly that Ivan had almost not finished the word before it and the bag of fluid had been tossed away, the stand kicked over to lie on the stained floor.
Ivan was looking up at him with astonished disbelief and wondering affection, more emotion than Ananke had ever thus far seen him express so openly.
“You are real,” Ivan said, and Mattie cut his eyes up from the cuffs he was unlocking to Ivan’s face, then back down again quickly. Ivan followed up, grinning, with, “Matthew Gale, you are a beautiful man.”
“Whatever you’re on, it’s good,” Mattie muttered, but he seemed relieved, and unlocked the second handcuff more easily.
“How did you find me?” Ivan asked as Mattie dropped to crouch at the ground to unlock his ankles.
Mattie paused for a moment before returning his attention to finding the keyhole in the chains.
“Ananke,” he answered, voice wary, guarded.
Ivan’s gaze shot up to Ananke’s camera. She recorded that glimpse of blue.
“Ananke contacted you,” he said.
“I was already on my way to find you,” Mattie said, finally finding the lock and undoing it, “when the computer…when Ananke contacted me and gave me your location.”
He stood up to walk around to the other side of the chair to free Ivan’s other leg and briefly locked eyes with him, exchanging a look that Ananke couldn’t read.
“Right,” Ivan muttered.
“Anyway, Ananke let me in,” Mattie said, crouching down again by the other leg, “and that’s how I— Ivan, what the hell is this? Did you get shot?”
He pressed his palm against Ivan’s thigh below the stained bandages, withdrawing it swiftly when Ivan hissed.
“I tried to escape,” he said. “Almost managed it. Operative word ‘almost.’ Althea intercepted.”
Mattie’s expression was dark, but he said nothing, instead uncuffing Ivan’s second ankle and then standing up.
“Come on,” he said, reaching down for Ivan’s arm and hauling him up out of the chair. “I’ve got us a ship. We’re going to get the hell out of here.”
He smiled at Ivan, a smile that faded quickly, and busied himself supporting Ivan, whose injured leg was mostly useless.
They made a strange pair in Ananke’s sight, Ivan all pale and bloodied, more like a ghost than a living man, and Mattie in a colorful patchwork jacket, with color to his skin and not a drop of blood on him.
“Where’s Constance?” Ivan asked, reaching up with one hand to jerk sharply at Mattie’s jacket when Mattie did not respond immediately, ostensibly focused on half carrying Ivan out of the door to the white room for the last time.
The door shut behind them and left the white room empty and silent, with Domitian still slumped and dead over the stained steel table.
“Mattie,” said Ivan. “Where’s Constance?”
“Not here,” Mattie said, the words bitten off, and Ivan looked taken aback.
Mattie relented a few more feet up the hallway. “I don’t know where she is. She’s with Milla—with your mother. They think you’re dead. I told them it didn’t matter and I was going to find you anyway, and Constance gave me a ship so that I could waste my time, not hers.”
Ivan said nothing, looking down at the ground before him as Mattie dragged him up it.
“They’re sure you’re dead,” Mattie said. “They were so sure, I almost thought—but they wouldn’t even look for you. They’re too busy running their revolution.”
“I want to find her, Mattie,” Ivan said.
“I arranged a rendezvous,” said Mattie, sounding unhappy about it. “I don’t know if she’ll come.”
Ananke saw Ivan’s jaw flex, but he said nothing.
“And it’s chaos out there,” Mattie said. “Complete and utter chaos. Even if she decided to go, she might not be able to make it.”
“But we’ll go,” said Ivan.
Mattie sighed.
“We’ll go,” he said.
They were nearly at the end of Ananke’s spine, nearly at the docking bay.
Ananke did not know whether she should warn them.
Althea waited at the doors to the docking bay with her gun in her hand. She heard Mattie and Ivan before she saw them but did not speak and did not let her hands waver.
All her fear, all her anger, all her confusion, had burned away something inside her, had hollowed her out and left her with nothing but this, standing between Ivan and escape.
“Stop,” she said, and Mattie looked up and saw her. He stopped abruptly, hauling Ivan up when he continued for another step and nearly fell, turning the two of them so that Ivan was twisted slightly behind him, his free hand reaching and drawing his gun so swiftly that it was instinct, not deliberation. Althea brought her other arm up so that she was clasping her gun in both hands to steady her aim. The two men watched her, breathing hard.
Mattie said, “Ivan, is this the bitch who shot you?”
Ivan, leaning heavily on him, looked at Althea and said, “Yes.”
“Is he dead?” she asked, and knew that Ivan would know who she meant.
“Domitian’s dead,” Ivan said. He did not sound afraid or full of hate. He only sounded tired.
For an instant Althea faltered. Domitian, dead. Domitian, who was strong and reliable and safe; Domitian, who had in the end not been quite who she’d thought he was; Domitian, who was dead.
Gagnon’s death and everything about Ananke had hollowed her out; Althea no longer had the energy to mourn, not even for Domitian. And more importantly, right now she did not have the time. Her gun had dipped; she lifted it back up those scant centimeters to keep it centered on Matthew Gale’s chest. “Give me one good reason,” she said, “for me not to shoot you both.”
“How about because if you do, I will fucking shoot you back?” Mattie said.
It was curious how when she looked at him, all she saw was the parts that Ananke had taken from him: the color of his hair and the way it seemed always on the edge of falling into his eyes, his height, the deftness of his long fingers, now curled around the gun he had aimed at Althea. She had created Ananke with this man whom she hardly knew, and now they were each waiting to kill the other.
All up and down the hallway the holographic terminals had started to glow red.
“What’s the point?” Ivan asked, and Althea dared to take her attention from Mattie to glance over at him. He looked exhausted, on the verge of collapse, and it was clear that Mattie was the only thing holding him up, but she saw sympathy in his face—sympathy for her.
“Althea,” he said, his voice nearly gentle. “The System is gone. The crew is dead. We’re the only ones left. You, me, and Ananke. Ananke wants you to let us go. There’s no more System to obey and no more crew to be loyal to.”
She did not lower the gun, but she listened. Ivan lied, and Ivan manipulated. She knew it was true. But she, too, was very tired.
“I know you weren’t aiming for my heart before,” Ivan said. “You only grazed me on purpose.”
Mattie had not said a word. Althea knew that that was another sign of a con, that Mattie was waiting for his partner to do his work, not interfering. Or perhaps this wasn’t a con at all and Mattie’s silence was respect for Ivan, who knew Althea better than he did.
For a moment Althea weighed things, on one side loyalty to the System, revenge for Domitian and Gagnon and Ida Stays, and all the things Althea had lost, and on the other no more corpses on the Ananke, and no more blood on her hands, and Ivan, somewhere, safe and alive.
Althea lowered her gun.
“What do I do now?” she asked. She did not care that she sounded lost, because she was.
“You have to stay with Ananke,” Ivan said, and Mattie glanced sharply at him but did not say anything. “Ananke needs someone with her. Someone to guide her.”
“Someone that isn’t you,” Althea said with bitterness, but Ivan accepted it.
Althea looked up into Ananke’s camera. She could not help it, nor could she stop the sudden surge of fear.
Ananke was her creation. She should not be afraid of her own creature. She should love Ananke. And she did. And Ananke could not be left alone.
“Of course,” Althea said, and prayed to whatever god could hear that Ananke would not hear the fear in her tone. “I’ll stay with Ananke.”
Ivan knew what she feared, of that much Althea was certain. She could see it in his face.
Mattie had put his gun away. He shrugged Ivan’s arm up higher on his shoulder, and when it became clear that neither Althea nor Ivan had anything more to say, he started forward with a muttered “Come on.”
Althea pressed herself against the wall to let them pass and stood at the door to the docking bay to watch as Mattie guided Ivan past the disemboweled and dead Annwn and into his ship. She stood in the hall and watched them go, watched them through the doors of the docking bay as their ship lifted off and out of Ananke, stood and watched until they were gone.
The holographic projectors had all been turned on, and when Althea turned around, she saw that Ananke had placed one image of herself in each one of them, the mixed features of Althea and Mattie with Ivan’s eyes standing at even intervals up and down the hall, all facing Althea.
Ida’s body was rotting in her quarters, Domitian’s body still bled in the white room, the thin shredded remains of Gagnon still appeared to circle Ananke’s black heart, and Althea stood in the ship’s spine all alone, standing with Ananke’s thousand deified eyes all trained on her.
She took a deep breath and made her voice even.
“It’s just us now,” said Althea, and Ananke said,
YES.