Chapter 5

IRON-56

SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE FALL OF EARTH

“We’re being followed,” Ivan said as he and Constance walked back to their ship from the System dispatch center, going down a narrow boulevard lined with Luna’s closely packed houses and shops. The docks were up ahead, and the Annwn had landed; there would be fewer people up there and less surveillance.

“I saw. System?” She spoke as he had spoken to her, in a murmur close to his skin, so that the cameras could see nothing of what they said.

“Probably,” Ivan said. “Not a lot of criminals around here; I doubt they’re trying to rob us.”

The con had gone smoothly. Ivan had chatted with the dispatcher, keeping him charmed and just distracted enough that the Hertzsprung ended up where it needed to go. No alarms had been raised, which meant that Mattie had not been found and the bombs had not been noticed. Whatever happened now was out of her hands: she had to trust Julian to succeed.

Ivan said, “They’ve got a positive identification on me if they’re following us. And through the cameras they’ve seen us come in and out of the Annwn, so they know where our ship is.”

The moon had swung around to face the sun while they were in the dispatch room; the sun gleamed through the atmospheric dome with a pale and brilliant light. Adrenaline prickled under Constance’s skin. “So we’re caught. Once we’re in the docks, they’ll fire.”

“Not yet. This isn’t Miranda. This is Luna; they’re much more civilized about their takedowns here. Besides, they won’t go for you. They’ll get me, and Mattie if he’s back yet. And I think they’ll take us alive. That Stays woman wants to interrogate us, and you can’t question a corpse.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Longer if they want us alive. And longer than that even, because this is a nice neighborhood,” Ivan said. “The tourists don’t want any unpleasantness, and the System doesn’t want anyone to know anything’s wrong. Luckily, we were planning to stay here another few days. If they realize we’re about to run, they’ll shorten the timetable.”

“Ivan, how long?”

“An hour, maybe two. They’ll wait for Mattie to get back. Relax, darling,” he added for the benefit of the cameras all around, and kissed her on the temple. She allowed the gesture, but unwillingly. When he saw her flashing glance, he looked at her with a sort of wary, half-fearful anticipation, the strange desirous look that he gave only her. That look meant that he was hers, meant that when the System came, he would fight and die with her, meant that there was truth beneath his charm. Seeing that look gave Constance the strength to maintain an untroubled expression as they walked—slowly—down the street.

The System was not as subtle as they thought themselves to be, or else they did not care that Ivan and Constance might know they were being followed. The second possibility gave her a chill; if the System no longer cared about being subtle, it meant that their being followed was not a hunt but a threat. It meant that they had Mattie, had Anji, and had Christoph.

No, Constance assured herself. The System could not have captured Anji and Christoph yet, not without her knowing about it. And no one would capture Mattie: her brother was a consummate survivor.

Ivan did not seem troubled, prattling on as if he noticed nothing, but Constance knew him, and she knew his fear. When she dug her fingers into his arm for comfort, he paused but did not otherwise respond.

At last, the Annwn appeared ahead between two other larger crafts of similar make. There was a checkpoint to get into the docks. Ivan handed the man their identification—Constance’s genuine, his faked—and chatted away with him while Constance watched his face closely. The man paused—or seemed to pause—at Ivan’s passport, but he let them through.

As they walked past the checkpoint and into the docks, Constance turned her head and saw the guard at the checkpoint bending down to speak into an intercom, his eyes watching them.

They got into the Annwn without being stopped. The minute the hatch closed behind them, Constance said, “I don’t think we have two hours, Ivan.”

“We do. They want Mattie, and they think we’re trapped.”

“We are trapped,” Constance said. Ivan already was climbing up the Annwn’s sideways hallway, heading for the piloting room. “We can’t just lift off; we’re under an atmospheric dome.”

“I noticed. Have a little faith, Constance. Don’t you think Mattie and I can convince that air lock to open?”

Ivan could convince just about anyone to do anything, Constance was sure. It was the one thing she could fear about him. She started climbing up after him just as he disappeared through the door leading to the piloting room. “It’s not whether you can get it open,” she said. “It’s how fast you can do it.”

“Very fast,” Ivan said, tipping an eyebrow at her when she came after him into the room. The Annwn’s piloting room was very small, comfortable for two people but cramped for three. Ivan already was sitting at the main computer interface. “Annie, are you ready for some fun?”

The computer screen blinked on. Constance could just read it over Ivan’s shoulder:

I AM ALWAYS READY FOR FUN. PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU’D LIKE ME TO DO.

“Not answer rhetorical questions for a start,” said Ivan. “But all right. Annie, do you know how to convince the atmospheric dome’s air lock to open up for us?”

Constance leaned on Ivan’s chair to read. MATTIE HAS ALREADY GIVEN ME INSTRUCTIONS.

Ivan turned around to look up at her. “See?”

“I see,” said Constance, and sat down in the chair beside him. When Mattie arrived, she knew, she would be kicked out of this chair so that he could fly the ship, but for now she claimed it as her own. Once Ivan had opened the air lock, any System soldiers following them would have to flee the area or suffocate, and the ship could take off unharmed. Even now Ivan was keying in the course for Mars so that when Mattie arrived they could leave immediately. Their time frame for escape must have been smaller than Ivan had admitted to her.

Lying was a habit with him. She didn’t call him on it this time.

“They’re going to arrest you when you get back to Mars,” he said as he entered the course into the navigation systems. “Just pretend you were shocked that we left so early. Embroider it if you like. You and I were busy in another room when Mattie came in, and suddenly the ship lifted off. Or I was deliberately keeping you busy so that you didn’t know what Mattie was up to. Whatever you think will keep their attention.”

Constance had neither Ivan’s inclination to embroider and storytell nor his talent with lying. “I’ll tell them something.”

“Now we wait for Mattie.”

“He’ll be here.” There were few things Constance had as much faith in as Mattie’s ability to be there when needed. At the moment she had different concerns, namely, what their rapid flight from the moon might change. They’d intended no farewells to Julian; he was on his way, anyway. The bombs had been delivered and in such a way that there was no connection between them and the ships that had collected the bombs. Mattie had gotten out safely and would be on board soon. There was nothing else Constance had planned to do.

She remembered half a conversation she and Ivan had had a long time before. “Did you have a chance to warn your mother?”

“I wish you wouldn’t mention her, even in here.”

“Where else could anyone mention her?” Ivan did not reply. “Well? I don’t want to accidentally murder the great Milla Ivanov.”

“I warned her another way,” Ivan said shortly.

Fine, let him keep his secrets. “You said she might join me,” Constance said.

Ivan laughed. “If she thinks it’s safe and if she thinks you can do what you think you can do, then yes. She hates the System, Constance. It’s the strongest thing she feels. She hates the System more than she cares about anything else.”

Odd phrasing, but Constance was caught up in imagining it: the wife of Connor Ivanov succeeding at last where her husband once had failed and succeeding at the side of the Mallt-y-Nos.

She looked forward to meeting Milla Ivanov.

Ivan said, “They’re closing in around us.”

The change in topic was drastic enough that it left her momentarily off balance, and she knew Ivan well enough to know that his simple sentence was a cover for something else. She wished that for once he would just say whatever it was he really thought the first time he thought it. Mattie might have the patience to read between the lines of his tangled words, but Constance knew it was a waste of her time. “I noticed.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“You mean the way a System intelligence agent has been asking after you and Mattie and you didn’t tell me until now?” Constance asked, and in response, Ivan flashed her that look again. That half-fearful, half-desirous look, all anticipation. It should not have bothered her: Ivan had always been spurred to life by arguing with her, and Constance had always found her blood burning from a conflict. So it was not unusual for Constance to snap and for Ivan to look at her like that, but something about it this time troubled her, something half remembered pricking at her thoughts.

Ivan said, “Did we hurt your feelings?”

“You should have told me the moment you knew.”

“It might have been nothing.”

“A System intelligence agent isn’t nothing,” Constance said.

“And you and Mattie keep no secrets from me,” said Ivan.

Anger flared up in her, totally disproportionate to the tone of Ivan’s remark. “That has nothing to do with this,” she said. “These are things that I have to know, Ivan, if we’re to succeed—”

“You’re not yourself, you know,” Ivan said. He had timed his words perfectly. They punctured Constance’s anger and left her silent, uncertain of his aim. He always timed his words perfectly.

Unimpeded, Ivan continued, his blue gaze tight and focused on her, as if he could dig into her skull and take her apart piece by piece. “When you’re leading, you can’t be Mattie’s sister or Anji’s friend. You can’t be anything but a leader. You lose something like that, you know.”

“I’m not being any different than I am,” Constance said, and Ivan looked at her again in a strange and wary way, and why did the way he looked at her trouble her so much now? It had never bothered her before—

Before either of them could say anything more, there was a rattling below. Constance reached under the computer panel for the gun that she knew Mattie kept hidden there, and Ivan sprang to his feet to stalk almost silently over to the doorway, leaning against the wall to peer out and down the hall.

He was unarmed, the idiot. If the System came through that door—

The tension suddenly left Ivan’s frame. He stepped out of the shadows. Mattie, then. Constance tucked the gun back into its place. Below, she heard the sound of the Annwn’s door closing. She heard Mattie’s voice say conversationally, “Did either of you know that this ship is surrounded by a small army of System soldiers?” but Constance hardly understood his words because with the weight of the gun still resting on her palm and with the question of Ivan’s expression in her head, she finally understood what had been troubling her about the way Ivan looked at her.

“No,” said Ivan, who was focused completely on Mattie—of course—and did not seem to notice Constance’s sudden stillness. “We’re primed for takeoff because we like to live on the edge. Get up here.” He stalked back over to the computer panel. The moment he moved, Constance let go of the gun and rose to her feet, surrendering the second chair to Mattie as he appeared at the doorway.

“Did it work?” she asked Mattie evenly without letting a breath of what she now knew into her voice. Even so, Ivan cast them both a strange and guarded look. Mattie grinned and gave her a thumbs-up, then threw himself into the seat beside Ivan.

The look that Ivan always gave her, that intimate expression that was hers and hers alone—Constance had seen it on his face before, just a few days earlier. The same expression that she had taken for desire, for something close to love, for something that proved he was hers, just as Mattie was hers, just as Anji and Christoph were hers; that was the expression on his face when the System soldier had held a gun to his head on Pallas and Ivan had expected it to fire. Ivan looked at her the same way he looked at something that would kill him, and he always had.

He had never been hers, Constance knew. He was Mattie’s, maybe, but he was not now and never had been hers.

Ivan was tapping at the computer in front of him, lights sparking on the panels. “Ready, Annie?” Mattie asked, and the ship rumbled and rose.

AFTER THE FALL OF EARTH

Constance came back to chaos.

“What’s going on?” Marisol yelled. “We heard shouting.”

Behind Constance, echoing over the empty mile separating the shuttles from Isabellon, she still could hear the shouts. The soldiers were all armed, Constance saw. Marisol had been on the verge of leading them back into the town.

“I called Arawn,” Marisol said, her fingers gripping Constance’s arm. “He’s coming down with reinforcements. What happened?”

“They turned on us.” The rumble of the generator going silent, the inn going dark. Milla Ivanov silhouetted against the starry lights outside. Her rage roared up like a fire through the shell of her shock. “They attacked us. They have Milla Ivanov. We’re going to get her back.”

A rumble overhead, a sonic boom; Constance lifted her eyes to a light in the sky as a spaceship hurtled down through the atmosphere too rapidly and flames leaped over its hull. This ship was shaped like a disk; its gravity-producing spin was slowing as it entered Mars’s gravity, heading down toward Constance. Arawn. Marisol’s fingers dug into her arm as if she would pull her out of the way of the falling starship, but Constance stood beneath it without flinching.

It braked as it got closer, thrusters adding more flame to the maelstrom surrounding it as it slowed its descent. It landed half a mile away, close—dangerously close—with a shock wave that blasted sand into the air in a second dust storm. Constance was walking toward it before the heat of its arrival could dissipate.

Unlike the little shuttles, Arawn’s ship blazed with light. The door on its side opened, and someone came striding out. Constance knew from the shape of him that it was Arawn, and ignoring the men who followed him out, ignoring Marisol and her own people behind her, she strode swiftly toward him and met him midway.

“Attacked?” Arawn asked. She could scarcely make out his features in the night.

“Betrayed,” said Constance. “They turned on us. Milla—”

“Is she dead?”

“No. I don’t know. They took her.”

Arawn’s hands were suddenly on her shoulders, warm. She hadn’t even noticed how cold it had gotten. The weight of his grip seemed to anchor her. “We’ll get her,” he promised. “You stay here. Marisol, take care of the Mallt-y-Nos.”

Constance threw off his arms. “Go now,” she told him. “Bring her back. Tell me the moment you learn anything.” Ignoring Marisol lingering behind her, she strode back to the shuttles.

The shuttle she had come down in was empty. It remained empty the whole time she sat there. Not even the pilot was inside. Her people were giving her space, as if she needed space, as if she were mourning.

She could not stop seeing Milla Ivanov as last she had seen the woman, silhouetted against the little light, taking a step out toward the oncoming crowd. And when she shook that image from her mind, she saw Ivan instead, chained to a chair, pale in a pale room and with desperate eyes.

Arawn returned near dawn, when the air had gone gray, when the rising sun made the sky red.

He brought with him a man from Isabellon and threw him by the nape of his neck at Constance’s feet to kneel before her on the sand and stone. It took Constance a moment to recognize him as the man with the curly hair who had spoken against her in the town, the same man she had met standing before the graves of his neighbors.

Marisol’s sucked in breath seemed to come from far away while Constance studied the man. He was bloodied and bruised, keeping one arm tucked close to his ribs, one eye scabbed shut. Impossible to tell if the eye was still there.

“Tell her what you told me,” Arawn said, and the man bent lower down to the Martian soil.

“The woman who came out,” the man began, the words slow and thick.

“Milla Ivanov,” said Constance. “Use her name.”

“Milla Ivanov,” the man said, and stopped.

Constance said, “What happened to her?”

“Dead. She’s dead.”

Mother, father, and son: all the Ivanovs. Constance had done what the System had failed to do in the end. She’d caused the deaths of the whole family.

“How?” Constance asked.

Her shadow fell over the man. He would not look up at her or could not, perhaps.

“She came out of the house,” he said. “We didn’t know who she was. Huntress, I swear, we didn’t know who she was.”

“No,” Constance said. “You thought she was me. Tell me how she died.”

“I don’t know,” said the man. “I didn’t do it. I don’t know how it happened. We took her into the crowd. Some of us had rocks, shovels. We thought a gun might be too loud. We didn’t want your ships to hear. She wasn’t—she was bloody when she came out. She was dead.”

Hatred made things clear. It removed the obstructions of doubt and fear and caution and put everything into perfect crystal clarity. Constance looked down at the man at her feet and knew that she would kill him. “And her body?”

The man did not answer, only bowed farther toward the dirt. Arawn said, “No, don’t stop now. This is the best part. Why don’t you tell the Mallt-y-Nos what you did to the body of the wisest woman she knew?”

The man lifted his head. He looked toward Constance. Perhaps he thought he might be able to appeal to her. Perhaps he simply had no other options.

“We realized we’d made a mistake,” he said. “We didn’t want you to know. We tried to hide it.”

“You tried to hide her body,” Constance repeated very quietly.

“Yes.”

“Where did you hide it?”

“Everywhere,” said the man. “She’s part of the desert now.”

Constance tried to picture it: Milla Ivanov dismembered, her blood absorbed by the ground, her slender professor’s hands taken from her wrists to become just another extension of the vast Martian desert. The revolution had devoured one of its mothers.

She looked down at the man at her feet. When she had met him, he’d said he had lost someone in the System’s first attack on Isabellon. She wondered whom he had lost. Had it been a lover? A friend? A mother? How could he have done this to her when she had stood next to him in sympathy?

“Kill him,” Constance said, and the man choked, his head falling back to rest on the soil. “And then burn his town. Level it.”

“With pleasure, Huntress,” Arawn said.

Marisol followed Constance back toward the shuttle. She did not stop even at the sound of the man’s voice rising on a plea and Arawn’s gun’s retort.

Was that how Ivan had died? she wondered. Bloody and beaten, with a plea and a gunshot? Constance wondered if that interrogator woman had killed him herself or if she’d left that old soldier to do the deed.

“What now?” Marisol asked. Her voice was unsteady. She shifted her weight as if to hide that her hands were shaking.

Constance had meant to rescue Mars, to drive off the System, but it repulsed her now, the idea of staying on this planet where Milla Ivanov had been murdered. The next step in her plan was Luna—No. To hell with her old and outdated plan, to hell with her rigid adherence to a plan of attack that no longer applied, and to hell with the inner planets. She would go somewhere where what she would do would matter. She would face her true enemy directly at last.

She would go where the System was.

“We go to Europa,” she said.

—

Jupiter, the greatest of the planets, the king of the gods, loomed large in the viewscreen of the Wild Hunt. The System was here. The System would be here. Constance would face them at last and end what she had begun.

“Keep radio channels open,” Constance ordered as they drifted in closer to the planet and its orbiting moons. “Let me know what kind of chatter you’re getting.”

The woman at the communications station nodded and fitted the headphones over her ears, listening. Marisol, standing at Constance’s side, leaned in to say, “What are you looking for?”

“Any System broadcasts,” Constance said. “I doubt they’re using their regular channels, so we have to find what channels they are using now. Anything encrypted is of interest.”

It was worthwhile to keep an eye out for Anji’s troops as well. Everything Constance had heard indicated that Anji had retreated to Saturn, abandoning Jupiter entirely. But there was always the chance that she still considered Jupiter her territory. Well, if she did, let her come. Constance would show her at last what it meant to betray the Mallt-y-Nos. And of course, if her people could find any sort of communication from Julian, or Christoph even, Constance would be glad—

“Huntress, we’ve detected something.” A man whose name Constance didn’t know was piloting; his voice was tense.

Constance came forward immediately. “What is it?”

“A fleet. There are ships down there, close to the planet.”

“Whose?”

The pilot hesitated. “Well?” she asked.

“They don’t appear to be System,” he said.

They still might have been Anji’s or Christoph’s, and it meant that Constance still did not know where the System fleet was hidden. “How many ships?”

“No exact number yet; around a hundred.”

Fewer than she had. “Try to get in contact with them.”

She could just see the ships now. They were tiny shadows breaking up the smooth lines of the planet’s clouds. They did not seem to be moving with a purpose but drifting with the tugs and tides of gravity’s pull.

“They’re not responding, Huntress,” said the woman at communications. For the life of her, Constance could not remember the woman’s name or even remember having met her before. The same with the pilot. She’d seen his face before, she thought, but she did not know his name. They must have been replacements for crew members who had died. Her dead friends were being replaced by people she did not know.

“Keep trying,” Constance said, and turned back to the viewscreen.

Io swung lazily between them and the planet, a circle of black against Jupiter’s swirling reds. The ships drifted slowly, ominously still.

“Still no response, Huntress.”

“Get closer,” Constance said, and began to pace.

“No response,” the woman at the communications station reported. “Actually, they don’t seem to be broadcasting anything at all. I can’t even detect signs of communications between the ships in the fleet.”

Marisol said uneasily, “Do they even know we’re here?”

“Huntress, the ships are cold,” the pilot said suddenly.

“What does that mean?” Constance asked.

“Their engines are off; they have no power.” He did something at his computer panel, checking something Constance couldn’t see. “Their life support isn’t functioning.”

“A dead fleet?” Marisol said.

For a time Constance just looked out at those drifting ships. A dead fleet. No one could survive the cold and airlessness of space. Even if they’d had space suits, they wouldn’t have been able to last for long.

“Can you access their computers?” Constance asked abruptly.

Baffled silence. Constance fought down annoyance. Mattie could have done it, she knew. Or Ivan. “All System computers have a back door so that the System can take control of them from a distance,” she said. “Even if that fleet wasn’t System, the System made those ships. Can anyone access their computers from here?”

Someone cleared his throat. The man at the station to monitor the Wild Hunt’s internal systems met Constance’s glance and said nervously, “I think I can, Huntress.”

“Do it.”

It took him a while longer than it should have, longer than it would have taken Mattie or Ivan. Constance knew she should have found other skilled computer technicians early on, separated them out, learned their names. They were useful, and people with their skills were few. But she’d never expected to need to, and there had been so many other things to claim her attention.

At last the man said, “Huntress, I’m in, but—”

“But what?”

“But the computers are wiped clean. There’s nothing on them.”

“What does that mean?” Marisol wanted to know.

“It means there’s nothing on them, no data, nothing. They’re…hollow. Like someone burned the ship from the inside out.”

“What could do that?” Marisol asked, but no one gave her an answer.

The System, Constance thought. Nothing but the System could have brought destruction so total and complete. A part of her was furious, a part of her elated. The System was here; she was sure of it. She had found them.

“Can you tell whose ships they were?” Constance asked. They were almost near enough to make out the details of the ships as they drifted.

“It’s hard to say; the data’s all gone,” the man said.

“Try,” said Constance. “And turn the life support back on on at least one of the ships; I want to find out what happened to them.” If the computers could tell them nothing, they would have to send a boarding party.

The man acknowledged her and went back to work. Constance watched the ships come closer and closer, watched the shape of the individual crafts become clear. It was a variety of ship types and classes and planets of origin; this fleet, she was sure, had been rebel, not System.

One of the ships had a peculiar and distinct shape: a disk with six rays sticking out from its center. It was an old Lunar style, with the rays functioning as engines, but the whole design had been discarded years earlier in favor of more efficient structures. The fanciful and the Terran, Constance knew, had always claimed that that particular type of ship looked like a six-pointed star.

Ships like that were old and outdated; there were few left in the solar system. Constance had known only one man who still flew one.

Hadn’t she just been wondering where he was?

Hadn’t she just been wondering why he hadn’t gotten back in contact with her?

Here, at last, was her answer.

“Huntress?” the man said hesitantly with bad news in the heaviness of his voice, but Constance didn’t need him to tell her what she had realized herself. She knew those ships; she knew the shapes of them.

“This was Julian’s fleet,” she said.

—

Althea stepped outside her room and into the Ananke’s long, bending hall.

She turned and looked down it both ways. Down toward the docking bay, a single mechanical arm was parked on a wobbling base. It did not totally obstruct the hallway—Althea could have slipped around it—but it somehow gave an impression of restriction nonetheless.

She didn’t want to go toward the docking bay, anyway. Althea turned in the other direction, toward the hallway that led ever deeper into the ship’s heart, and began to walk, her feet almost soundless on the floor.

She had not gone two paces before there was a hum and a rumble as something weighty rolled over the grated floor. Althea turned. The mechanical arm farther up the hall rolled to a stop.

When she started to walk again, she heard the rumbling start anew, the mechanical arm tailing her at a constant distance.

With every step she took, it followed right behind her. When she stopped, it stopped. It moved when she moved, stopped when she stopped, as if it were her own self displaced. It haunted her as closely as a shadow, as perniciously as all the other ghosts on this dead ship haunted her thoughts. If Ananke had wanted, she could have kept track of Althea without Althea knowing, through the cameras spread out over the entire ship. But the mechanical arm followed Althea without subtlety, without caring that Althea knew that it followed. It was not a hunt; it was a threat.

She diverted into the piloting room when she came to the door rather than continue down that hall.

The little room was familiar to her, but that familiarity had lost its comfort. A recording of Ivan and Mattie played on a screen to her right with the sound off. Impossible to tell from Ivan’s expression what the context of the message was or to whom it had been sent, but Mattie’s lips moved in soundless speech, speaking urgently, some warning that was going unheard.

On the main viewscreen was the view from outside the ship. Althea crossed the deck to stand before it and stare out into space.

The sun was brighter now. Closer.

“They have gone to Mars,” Ananke said. “I’ll find him on Mars.”

Althea had nothing to say to that.

“They’re following the Mallt-y-Nos,” Ananke said. “But they’re a few steps behind. She is no longer on Mars.”

For a moment Althea envisioned Ananke falling into the sun, burning up, her metal and carbon flesh melting away. The black hole, uncovered, devoured the light offered to it, swallowing the sun, sending the whole solar system into dark and cold eternity.

“If I offer them her,” said Ananke, “they’ll help me.”

Althea had to be careful, clever. If she accustomed Ananke to her presence at the base of the ship, if she made Ananke think that there was nothing significant about her going down to the base of her spine, perhaps she would have a chance.

She turned and left the room.

“Where are you going?” Ananke asked.

Althea didn’t answer. Out in the hall, the mechanical arm had gotten closer. Althea ignored it and continued on her path down Ananke’s spine. Ananke appeared in the holographic terminal ahead, her sightless blue eyes fixed on Althea’s face. Althea didn’t meet them. They were nothing more than an image.

“I figured out the revolutionaries’ signal,” Ananke said. “When I find them, I can contact them. They’ll answer my call.”

One foot in front of the other. If Althea kept her paces perfectly even, it was almost calming enough for her to forget the rumble of the mechanical arm right at her back.

“Do you want to know what the signal is?” Ananke asked.

It was not all that far to the base of the ship. Althea had measured it once, as she’d learned all of Ananke’s dimensions. She wondered how many paces of her own it would take to go down and back up again.

Next time around, she decided, she would count them.

“It’s the barking of hounds,” Ananke said. “A particular sound clip. Listen.”

It erupted from the speakers before Althea, behind Althea, all up and down the hall: the barking and howling of hounds. It filled the Ananke’s silent passageways and echoed through the dead halls as if the hunt were closing in on Althea, and still she walked up and down that hall.

—

It took a very long time to travel in space. On the Wild Hunt and in Constance’s fleet, that was not a big problem. All her ships had relativistic drives and could travel between the inner planets in a matter of days. But Julian’s ships could be boarded only by shuttle, and the kinetic energy of one ship crashing into another was a genuine concern: such a collision could pierce the skin of one of the ships or both and leave the passengers suffocating on empty air.

And so the shuttle traveled slowly from the Wild Hunt to Julian’s flagship.

There was no room for anyone but the pilots in the instrument-choked piloting room of the shuttle, and so Constance sat just outside, close enough to look in and speak to the pilots but crammed in with the rest of her people in the main body of the shuttle. This was a small shuttle; she had many that were larger, but she did not want to take a large crew with her today. The space was cramped. Marisol was sitting beside Constance, her shoulder pressed into her arm. She’d thought that Constance shouldn’t go, that the trip could be dangerous, a sentiment Milla’s death had inspired in her, Constance had no doubt. Julian had been Constance’s friend, Julian had been Constance’s ally, and Constance was going to see how he had died.

Constance had put out a call for doctors, engineers, technicians, anyone who might be able to shed some light on what had befallen Julian’s fleet. She’d gotten what she wanted, but none of the faces were ones that she knew. Only Marisol, sitting beside her, and Rayet, across from her with his head hanging down and his hands dangling between his knees, were familiar.

There was whispering in the back of the shuttle, a low susurration of sound, scarcely louder than the humming of the air filtration equipment over Constance’s head. She allowed it to happen. There was no reason to be silent on the whole ride over except for a vague sense of respect for the dead, and the shuttle flight was so long that she would not have tried to enforce any law of silence.

The dead fleet drifted. For now, Julian’s ship at least was in a reasonably stable place; its orbit was decaying, along with the orbits of the rest of the silent ships, but it would be some time before it fell into the planet’s clouds. The fleet was dispersing like scent in the air, the ships drifting farther and farther apart, and Constance imagined that some of the ships had fallen inward and become part of Jupiter already.

She had come at a fortunate time, she told herself. A few weeks later and the fleet would have been gone entirely. A few weeks earlier or even a few days earlier and she might have been subject to the same doom that had fallen on Julian.

The whispering in the back of the shuttle grew louder, more excitable, an argument of a sort growing in speed and heat. Constance diverted her attention from the drifting disk of Julian’s familiar ship to hear what was being discussed a few feet away.

“…a sign, a sign, you see. For Earth. For Venus…”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no way the Venereans could have—”

“I’m not saying it was the Venereans who did it. That many people don’t die without leaving a mark on the universe, you hear me? This is a sign. This is a warning—”

“They say that scientists haven’t found all the life there is in the solar system.” Another voice, excitable. “Or who knows what the System was hiding? Maybe there’s something in Jupiter, living in Jupiter, and it came out—”

“Something like that would leave a trace. No, there’s no trace here. I tell you, this is a warning. The only thing that could have done this is—”

“The System,” Constance said, turning to look toward the source of the whispers. Two men and a woman looked back at her with varying degrees of embarrassment and fear. “Look around,” Constance told them. “What could do this and not leave a trace? Not a god or a monster. Someone who could access the ships’ computers and take control of them. The System did this.”

No one said a word to contradict her, and after a time Constance returned her attention to the spinning disk of Julian’s ship as it came closer and closer. The whispers in the back of the shuttle did not start again.

The pilot brought the shuttle up effortlessly to the docking bay of Julian’s ship. On the Wild Hunt, someone manipulated the shuttle bay doors to open, and they glided in. Gravity and power had been restored already, but the pilot still ran a check before opening the door.

“All clear,” he said, and Constance was the first one out.

Julian’s ship was chilly and there was a stale scent to the air, but it was breathable and warm enough that Constance could not ascribe to it the gooseflesh on her arms. All the shuttles were still in the docking bay, and aside from Constance and her crew, the docking bay was completely empty. Either no one had been able to escape by shuttle or no one had had time.

“Rayet, go to the engineering and storage rooms,” Constance said. “Find out what stopped the ship. Marisol, check inside these shuttles and the escape pods. I’ll go to the piloting room.” If there was any place on this ship Julian would have been, it was the piloting room.

Rayet said, “Shouldn’t I go with you, Huntress?”

“I need someone to check the engines,” Constance told him, and he exchanged a brief glance with Marisol but bowed his head in acquiescence.

The ship’s engines were a basso hum somewhere in the distance, but otherwise all was silent. The sound of their feet seemed to profane the heavy silence of the hold, as if Constance had opened the way into some long-sealed tomb where the walls had grown unaccustomed to the beat of human feet. She could feel the unease of the people following her almost as palpably as she could feel the emptiness of the ship but did not acknowledge it herself.

Rayet pulled open the door to the hallway and stopped. For a moment, all Constance could see was his broad shoulders, straight and still. Then he turned to look at her, and his look was warning and grim confirmation all at once. She strode forward to look past him out into the corridor, where she saw what she had feared, what she had known she would find all along: corpses fallen on the floor, bodies slumped against the walls. Julian’s crew members had died where they stood. One of the dead was stretched out toward the door to the docking bay as if he had realized too late that he should flee toward the safety of the shuttles.

The bodies had fallen when the ship’s interrupted gravity had been resumed; that explained why they looked so broken and limp, like dolls that had been cast down by a great unseen hand. The ship’s slow chilling had frozen ice crystals on their skin and in their bodies, and the ship’s resumed warmth had melted the crystals again, but the ice had already torn skin and ripped cell walls, and the bodies Constance looked at had skin of a strangely soft appearance, in places bruised. One of the bodies must have had ice crystals form around her eyes; the meltwater from those crystals streaked down her cheeks like tears. Constance stood in the doorway for a moment, thinking of the frozen corpses on Miranda.

“Come on,” she said, and stepped into the hallway, around the dead man’s outstretched arm.

Julian’s ship was a very standard Lunar type; the halls were cylindrical and made of steel, patterned with support beams like a rib cage. The support beams were spaced closely enough to be used as a ladder in case of a failure of the ship’s gravity. Because it was a standard layout, Constance knew where to go.

Yet with every step she took, it followed right behind her, dark and hulking and low above her head: her old fear. This was what the System did; this was what it would do. It followed her where she went as if it were her own self displaced. It haunted her as closely as a shadow, as thickly laid and inescapable as the bodies that filled these halls.

But she was not afraid. She could not be afraid. She held her head high and ignored that fear, sending off her followers to look in the rooms they passed: bedrooms, rec rooms, computer rooms. By the time she reached the door to the piloting room, she was the only one left. That was as it should be: if Julian was dead, she would give him the honor of private witness.

Constance pushed open the door to the piloting room and stopped.

Frozen in place on that main screen, impossible not to notice, the first thing Constance saw when she entered, was an image of two faces she knew very well.

For a moment she thought it must have been an old picture, though why an old picture would be showing on the main screen of a battleship was beyond her. But no, she thought. Surely Ivan had never looked that tired before. Surely Mattie had never looked so grim. For the image was of Ivan and Mattie—Ivan seated, Mattie leaning on the back of his chair, both of them looking directly at the screen, frozen in the moment before speech.

Constance stood and looked back at them and felt seen even though she knew that they could not see her. Anji had been telling the truth, she realized, yet Milla had died without ever knowing for sure. Ivan was alive.

If Anji hadn’t been lying about the men being alive, the rest of her story could be true as well. Constance tried to trace it out in her head. The men had been delayed somehow and had missed the rendezvous at Callisto. Then they’d gone to Anji only to find that she was no longer allied with Constance. They’d left Anji, and…

Her thoughts stalled. What did it matter where they’d gone and what they’d done? They were alive. And if Anji had spoken true, they were looking for Constance and had been all this time.

Constance had thought they were no longer hers. She’d thought that Mattie had chosen Ivan over her, that Ivan had lied every time he’d spoken. But here they were, seeking her out through a war and the Wild Hunt.

“Constance,” someone called, and she turned too late to stop Marisol from entering the room behind her.

Marisol stared up at the vast image of Constance’s family on the wall and then around herself, gaping. For the first time, Constance realized that the image of Ivan and Mattie was not just on the main screen; it was on all the screens around her. The piloting room was designed with typical Lunar pretensions to grandeur: there were levels to it, balconies. The main floor was the central piloting area, reachable by a gently curved but fairly cramped staircase to Constance’s right. To her left, overlooking the main floor and reachable by another short, narrow staircase, was the captain’s room, a duplicate of most of the main floor’s areas except for its privacy. The main screen took up nearly two stories of space right in front of Constance, and so it could be seen from both the main floor and the captain’s room. The image of Ivan and Mattie was on all of the screens, the large and the small, on both floors of the piloting room.

What had caused that? Now that she had been freed of her initial reaction to seeing their faces again, their appearance here was ominous. What connection had they had with the destruction of Julian’s fleet? She was sure they hadn’t caused it. Mattie and Ivan had killed, but they weren’t killers. The System must have attacked while Ivan and Mattie were in communication with Julian.

But Constance thought of the superstitious murmurs on her shuttle and grew cold.

“Marisol, shut the door and lock it,” she said, and Marisol obeyed. “Shut off all the screens.”

Marisol did as Constance said. Constance turned to the nearest screens and began to click them off or tear them from the wall with a wrenching of wires. Marisol went down the stairs to the main floor, and Constance traveled up toward the captain’s room.

Where were Ivan and Mattie now? she wondered as she erased their image from another screen. Had the System caught them, too? Were their corpses drifting in one of the ships in Julian’s fleet? Perhaps they were already dead.

In the captain’s room Constance found Julian’s body. He had died near a communications interface, the only computer screen in the whole of the piloting room that did not show an image of Ivan and Mattie’s faces. For a moment Constance stood over his body and looked down at his blankly staring eyes, the lips and tongue that had swollen from choking. She surprised herself by feeling so little. It even seemed useless to promise him she would exact justice for his death: even if he had not died, she would have pursued the System all the same.

She spent longer looking at the black screen that was unlike the rest. What image had that shown? she wondered. The face of the System slave who had killed Constance’s friends? It was useless to wonder, pointless to try to find out. The System would die regardless.

The last screen left was the main screen, the vast one. Constance could not find a way to shut it off from the captain’s room.

“I can’t figure out how to turn this one off,” Marisol said when Constance came to the edge of the balcony.

Constance looked at the screen, really looked at it for a moment, her eyes following the familiar shapes of Mattie and Ivan’s faces. Then she went back into the captain’s room, stepping past Julian’s body, and grabbed one of the chairs.

From the edge of the balcony she could just reach the upper half of the viewscreen. She swung the chair around and into the glass. Marisol made a startled sound, jumping back as sparks fell. Where the chair had made an impact, there was a starburst of cracks and strange colors, partly obscuring Ivan’s head. Only one blue eye looked out now.

Marisol was staring at her. Constance did not appeal to her for help but swung the chair again. Another starburst appeared on the screen, further obscuring the shape.

Dragging the chair behind her, Constance walked down from the captain’s room to the door level, then down the other staircase to the main floor, where Marisol still stood and watched her. From the lower level, she lifted the chair and slammed it into the screen again and again. When she lowered the chair, her breath coming short, the screen was ruined. Bits of the image still showed—the edge of Mattie’s finger, the curve of Ivan’s shoulder—but no one who looked at it would have been able to recognize that the screen once had shown two men or who the men had been.

When the screen was sparking splinters, Constance leaned on the back of the chair and caught her breath.

They are alive, she thought. They’re alive.

It did not bring the same lift to her heart that it had just moments earlier.

The men were alive, yes, but they were far away from her. She could not go look for them. She had an army and a war to run. No matter how she might wish they were there, by her side, she could not leave her responsibilities behind to find two men.

She could try to contact them, try to get a message to them, wherever they were. But she did not know where they were, and she did not want to bring unfriendly attention to them by being too obvious in her attempts to contact them. It was dangerous in these times to be loved by the Mallt-y-Nos.

And then there was the third thought, the last and most dreadful.

The third thought brought with it the memory of the heat of her old home on Miranda burning, knowing that Abigail was somewhere in those flames. It brought with it the image of Milla Ivanov silhouetted against the lights held by those who would tear her apart, the memory of Henry’s body crushed by ash and stone, the reminder that she even now stood on Julian’s ship, surrounded by his dead crew, with Julian dead there, too. She even remembered Christoph, dead by her own order, as good as murdered by her own hand.

All of her old allies and loyal friends were dying. And here were the oldest and most loyal, brought back from the dead.

The men were not hers. Mattie had turned from her. Ivan had never been hers at all. She would not take them as hers now; she would not give Mattie another reason to loathe her, and she would not give Ivan the death he’d always wanted to blame on her.

Marisol said, “That was Milla’s son.”

Denying it would not conceal the evident family resemblance. “Yes.”

Marisol said, “Did you know he was alive?”

“No,” said Constance. She expected Marisol to ask a dozen other questions: Who was the other man? Where were they? Why were they here, and what did they have to do with what had happened to this fleet?

But Marisol asked none of them. When Constance turned to look at her, troubled by the long silence, she found Marisol looking down at the bodies fallen and limp at her feet.

“Well?” Constance said quietly.

Marisol looked up at her. “I won’t tell anyone,” she said just as quietly. Her hair was pulled back out of her face. It made her look older. In her soft brown eyes Constance saw nothing but honesty.

“Good,” Constance said, and left the chair in the center of the floor, stepping around the bodies on the ship of the dead.

—

Europa was made of ice. Wherever Constance stepped, thick glacier supported her feet, and below that was a whirling ocean of freshwater. Beneath the atmospheric dome, the planet was livable but frigid, the better to keep the ice solid all the way through.

Constance had given Julian and his crew whatever funeral she could give them. She’d had their dead ships driven into Jupiter’s clouds to fall inward, ignite, and be crushed, absorbed into the bulk of the massive planet. A burial of a sort. She could do that much, at least. And it ensured that no one else would find any trace of Ivan and Mattie.

Then she’d done what she’d been waiting to do: she’d gone to Europa. It had been easy enough to get into Europa’s dome. An uncontrolled and undefended air lock provided Constance with ingress; once she and the main mass of her forces had landed on the ice, she took the air lock for herself. It had been foolish of the System to leave any of the air locks unguarded, but they had. Her troops made camp not far from where the multilayered glass of the greenhouse enclosure plunged into the ice, separating the livable dome from the faint wispy atmosphere and lethal cold just outside. Constance could just see that barrier glinting faintly in rare twinkles of sunlight, blurring the landscape on the other side.

Europa was tidally locked to Jupiter, and Constance’s fleet had landed on the Jovian-facing side, in the Annwn Regio. What sunlight the moon got was less noticeable than the vast and weighty bulk of Jupiter looming overhead. Twenty-four times larger than Terra’s moon appeared from Earth’s now-dead surface, Jupiter seemed unnaturally close, as if it might crash down at any moment.

The Annwn Regio. Constance wondered now, as she never had thought to wonder before, if when Ivan had named his and Mattie’s ship, he’d named the Annwn for this region of Europa or if the name was older than that.

Arawn came back to their camp in the early hours of the second watch. He did not come back alone.

“Who are they?” Constance asked when he appeared at last, frost in his beard, grinning. Being from Pluto, he probably enjoyed the cold. When she asked, he spread his arms expansively to indicate his two captives. One of them was a System soldier. His cleanly cropped regulation mustache was showing signs of becoming unruly, and there was a frostbitten patch on his cheek. His gaze was frightened but not terrified: clearly, he had not recognized her. The other was a Europan native, a skinny young man whose thick clothes did not disguise the fact that Constance probably could have broken him in half with one arm. He did not look much older than Marisol.

Both were cuffed. Constance did not think Arawn would have bothered to bring handcuffs with him on his scouting mission, and so it was likely that they were cuffed with the System soldier’s own chains. Arawn, Constance did not doubt, would have found that particularly amusing.

“I found them fighting a few miles from here,” Arawn said. “Pulled them apart. The young one tried to run or we wouldn’t have tied him up, too—any man fighting the System is a friend of ours.”

The young man had slate-gray eyes that slid past hers as if he did not have the courage to maintain eye contact. “You were fighting him?” Constance asked the young man, and he glanced at his unwilling companion, then gave her a short, jerky nod.

“Good,” said Constance. She looked at the System man and thought of Julian and his fleet, thought of the Ivanovs, thought of Abigail Hunter, thought of her own mother, thought of all the people she had known who were gone now.

She took out her gun and shot him. He fell to the ground, where his blood could freeze with the ice.

Marisol made a sound like a gasp; it was inappropriate to show shock in these circumstances, but Constance would speak to her later. The Europan boy was wide-eyed and horrified. In his face, she saw the terror she hadn’t seen in the System man’s eyes.

“You will be our guide,” Constance said to the young man. “What is your name?”

She did not wish to repeat herself, but he still didn’t seem to understand, looking at her blankly. She started to wonder if he was an idiot. Then Marisol said, “What is your name?” and something about her tone or the sight of her seemed to bring him back to himself.

“Tory,” he said.

“My name is Marisol,” she said. “This is Constance Harper—the Mallt-y-Nos.”

His gloved hands tugged reflexively at the chains that bound them; he was as wary as an animal.

“Tory,” said Constance, “I’ve come here to free this planet from the System, and I need a guide. You’re from Europa, aren’t you?”

He hesitated. She saw his Adam’s apple bob. “Yes.”

“Then you know this region.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to lead us to all the System strongholds nearby,” Constance said.

“There aren’t any,” he told her.

She’d always found Jovian accents difficult to understand. The emphasis never seemed to be on the part of the word where she expected it to be. Tory’s accent was exceptionally heavy, and so for a moment she imagined she had misheard him.

“We know that there are System bases here,” Constance said.

“There aren’t,” Tory said. “The System isn’t here. You don’t need to be on this moon.”

“If the System isn’t here, then who was he?” Constance asked with a tip of her chin toward the body sprawled on the ice. Tory’s eyes dipped unwillingly toward it and then swiftly away. He seemed to have no answer for her.

“Marisol,” Constance said, “take him back to my shuttle. Arawn and I will join you in a moment.” Marisol left her side to go to Tory, putting one hand on his elbow to guide him along.

“Did you run into any trouble?” Constance asked.

“No,” said Arawn. “Just those two trying to kill each other. Wouldn’t talk to us, though, not even after we pulled them apart. You’re trusting a lot to Marisol.”

“She’s earned it,” Constance said.

“She’s still just a girl.”

“I know that you and Marisol disagree on many things,” Constance said impatiently, “but find a way to respect her. We can have no more discord in this army.”

She could just see the shape of what might be the edge of the nearest Europan city on the horizon. Only a few people would live this close to the edge of the greenhouse enclosure. The bulk of the population would be deeper in, in the densely populated cities of the central greenhouse enclosures. She would sweep this area first, cleaning out the smaller towns, looking for hidden System bases, and gaining support from the Europans nearby before she took on the massive cities.

The deeper parts of the Europan ice were a brilliant and startling blue, an unusual clarity to the ice, a color that reminded Constance of the late Milla Ivanov and her lost son. But most of the surface was white with crystals that had melted and refrozen or precipitated as snow or hail from the atmospheric dome’s inconsistent weather patterns. Something about the whiteness of the surroundings and the young Europan man’s light eyes and the chains around his wrists troubled her with a recollection and a comparison she did not want, but she was shaken away from it when Arawn spoke to her:

“I’m sorry about Doctor Ivanov. She was a hell of a woman.”

“Thank you,” said Constance.

“And I’m sorry about your friend Julian. I never met him, but I heard he was a friend of the Ivanov family.”

“He was involved in Connor Ivanov’s revolution somehow,” Constance said. “I never learned the details.”

“An old secret, then,” Arawn said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

With Julian dead and Milla and Connor Ivanov dead, Constance supposed it didn’t. Arawn said, “You’ve lost a lot of people lately.” He was standing close enough to her to block in a buffer of slightly warmer air, close enough that Marisol, Tory, and the rest of Constance’s army seemed for the moment far away.

Arawn said, “Not everyone who cares about you is gone, Huntress.”

The light of a Europan orbit was curious: the darkness behind the planet, the dim day when the sun managed to hit the Annwn Regio askew, the orange gloaming with light reflecting from Jupiter onto Europa’s surface, not all that drastically different from the brief time when the sun managed to reach the point of the moon on which they stood. She and Arawn stood in a strange twilight on that icy moon. For a moment, Constance saw it, his skin bared and hers, his arms around her waist and his beard scratching her skin as he kissed her in supplication, falling to his knees before her.

“We have work to do,” Constance said rather than dwell on that thought, and followed Marisol into the shuttle.

The shuttle was a large one, designed for troop movements. The main computer display already had been changed to show a map of the silver surface of Europa, scratched through with brushstroke surface features, a jagged white line outlining the parts of the surface that were covered by the greenhouse enclosure. The light from that display paled the interior of the shuttle: the bare walls and the marks on the floor where the additional seating had been folded away again. Yet even though this was one of Constance’s largest shuttles, about as large as a ship could be while still being efficient for use in an atmosphere, the room still was cramped and the ceiling still was low. Marisol had unfolded one of the chairs against the wall for Tory, and when Constance came in, she was uncuffing his hands.

“Hey, now,” Arawn said as he followed Constance. Constance gestured for the technicians still in the shuttle to get out, and they did. Marisol gave Arawn a sour sort of look and continued what she was doing, which was recuffing Tory with his hands in front of him rather than behind.

Arawn couldn’t plausibly protest that, and at a glance from Constance, he shrugged. Constance went to stand in front of Tory, who was cuffed and still, watching her with a wary eye.

“Where does the fleet hide?” she asked him.

“Fleet?”

“The System fleet,” Constance said. “We know they’re here: where are they landed? Are they on Europa?”

“No.”

“Do they use one of the other moons as a base, then?” Constance asked. Another thought struck her. “Do they hide their ships in Jupiter’s clouds?”

“The fleet isn’t here.”

Arawn scoffed. “Fleet has to be here,” he said.

“Anything you can tell us will help,” Marisol said.

“I can’t tell you anything,” Tory said. “The fleet isn’t here. I don’t know why you think it is.”

“We had reports,” Constance said.

“Your reports were wrong.”

“Think we were wrong about this one, Constance?” Arawn asked with a meaningful glance at Tory.

Constance. Had he always named her so casually? She said to Tory, “We found a fleet of dead ships around Jupiter—my fleet. Those ships were commanded by my ally, my friend, but they were all dead, the computers wiped clean. Someone had done this without even boarding them.” Tory was looking at her with recognition on his face. Constance said, “Whoever killed them did it through their computers. Who else could do that but the System?”

“The System didn’t do that,” Tory said.

“Then what did?” Arawn demanded.

Tory hesitated. “Nobody knew,” he said at last. “We saw it pass—not up close, just as a star that moved faster than the rest. And when it passed by, we knew it passed, because it made all our computers its own. They stopped working, or they started working strangely. The screens showed nothing, or showed static, or they said ‘Wake up.’ Nothing but ‘Wake up, wake up.’ Over and over again, ‘Wake up.’ ”

“What, a ghost story?” said Arawn.

“What else?” Marisol pressed.

“The holographic projectors turned on by themselves,” Tory said. “They all showed the same hologram, but it was flawed. It was a woman. At first she was dark, with blue eyes and curly hair, but the hologram kept failing and showing a different woman instead…pale, with dark eyes.”

“What makes you say this wasn’t the System spreading some computer virus?” Constance asked.

“I’ve lived with the System, too,” Tory replied. “There was no reason for this. It was some sort of virus, yes, but the virus doesn’t do anything. The computers are just chaotic.”

“And couldn’t that be the function of the virus?”

“If the computers are down,” Tory said, “the System can’t use them to access the cameras left here.”

It was a good point. Constance paused for a moment and tried to imagine the System willingly giving up access to its own surveillance even for a moment.

She dismissed the thought. The System was desperate now; that much was clear. “Then what do your people say it was, if not the System?”

“Some people said it was an old god coming back to punish us for our sins. Some people said it was a monster that the System had kept controlled and the Mallt-y-Nos had set free. God or monster, it’s the same theory, just different words.” It was as if speaking of the ghost ship had freed Tory’s tongue, and his words came spilling out with the cadence and shine of a story; it was like the way Ivan spoke. “And some people say it was a rogue ship that was System once and had its computer infected with a virus, and it’s spreading that virus now.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don’t believe in gods that fly by and fry circuitry. That was a ship. I don’t know whose it was, but it wasn’t the System’s.”

Killing Constance’s people was the kind of thing the System liked to do. And it would make far more sense for the ship Tory described to have a base somewhere among Jupiter’s moons than for it to have been rogue. A single ship, all on its own? People could not survive on their own now; they had to band together, to take sides. That ship was System no matter what Tory said. “And you know nothing more about that ship or where it might have gone?”

“I don’t know anything about that ship at all,” Tory said.

Constance was beginning to doubt that. “But you will know about where the System is on the surface. Marisol—” She gestured toward the map on the wall, and Marisol came obediently forward to gesture at the surface, at the spot where Constance’s fleet had landed.

“The nearest towns are here and here,” she said, her arm dark against the light of the screen. “Are they System or free?”

Arawn caught at Constance’s arm, his fingers curling around her skin. He said, “He’s System, Con. I don’t know why he was fighting that other man—maybe some sort of training.”

Constance pulled her arm from his grasp.

Tory was saying, “They aren’t System. There’s no System here.”

Marisol hesitated, glancing at Constance. “What about the cities?” she asked, gesturing toward the center of the greenhouse-enclosed portion of the map. “What about Mara and Aquilon? Is the System there?”

“There’s no System on this moon.”

“That’s not what we’ve heard,” Arawn said.

“There are people who call themselves System, but they’re not System anymore,” said Tory.

Arawn showed the canine glint of his teeth. “Then why don’t you tell us about these people who aren’t System anymore?”

Tory glanced from him to Constance. His hands were twisted into fists beneath his restraints. Whatever he was looking for from Constance, he did not seem to find. “I don’t know anything about them.”

“Bullshit,” said Arawn.

“I don’t—”

Arawn crouched down at Tory’s side suddenly. Tory’s breath was coming fast. He looked again to Constance as if he were asking something of her, and when she didn’t move—what could he want of her?—he looked instead to Marisol.

Arawn said, “I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t know anything,” said Tory.

Constance said, “You were fighting a System man when we found you. Why?”

“He was trying to rob me,” Tory said.

Arawn laughed. Tory was leaning as far from him as he could without falling off the chair. Marisol said, “Listen. Maybe you don’t know anything about the System, but you could help us find someone who does. Do you know about any revolutionary groups on the planet?”

“The Conmacs,” Tory said. “There’s a group in the Conamara Chaos; I know about them.”

“Arawn, send someone to make contact with the Conmacs once we’re done here,” Constance said, and Arawn rose to his feet as she came forward to face Tory. “That’s good,” she said, “but it’s not what we want.”

“I don’t know anything about how the cities are divided,” Tory said.

“Then tell us about the nearby towns,” said Constance.

Arawn was still standing over him, near and silent, his hand resting on the knife at his belt. Tory looked up at him, then back at Constance. He said haltingly, “Gwern. Midir. Cadair. Idris.”

“And those are all System towns?” Constance asked him.

Tory hesitated.

“Well?” said Arawn. “Answer the Huntress.”

“Yes,” Tory said. “I don’t know. Yes.”

Constance looked to Marisol. Slowly, almost as if she were hesitating, Marisol reached up to the display and began to mark the towns, the touch of her fingertips on the screen boxing them in red.

Constance studied the array of towns. They were all south of her position, leaving the north completely unmarked. “What else?”

“Cuun,” said Tory, thickly. “I think Cuun, too.”

Marisol marked that one down as well. It was to the east of Constance’s position. To the west, there was the line of the greenhouse enclosure, the path that her fleet had taken and where it had found nothing.

To the north was where they had found Tory.

Constance said, “I think you’re lying to me.”

Marisol said, “Constance—” Again so personal a naming.

“What town is up here, then?” Constance asked, walking over to the screen to gesture at the empty part of the map. She lowered her hand. “It’s your town, isn’t it?”

Tory’s eyes darted fast from the map to her face, providing unspoken confirmation of her guess.

“Why,” Constance said, coming back slowly to where he sat rigidly, bound in the chair beneath Arawn’s shadow, “would you not want us to know about your town?” She stopped a few bare feet from where he sat. “Is it because your town is the one that’s truly System?”

For a single and terrible moment when she looked at Tory, cuffed and seated and pale, it was no longer Tory who sat there but Ivan, chained down in a white room and watching her, hopeless, and in that terrible, flashing moment her heart faltered with doubt and sudden fear.

Then Tory said bitterly, “You know, they used to talk about you like you were a god.”

“Did they,” said Constance.

“Do you want to know how they talk about you now?”

“Tell me.”

“They say at least the System knew when to stop.”

“And would you prefer the System was back?”

“I might!”

“Arawn and Marisol,” Constance said. “We go north—”

“No!” said Tory, starting to rise. Arawn pushed him back down with one hand. “No, please, they aren’t System—”

“Constance,” Marisol said, taking a step toward her, her hands stretched out, half beseeching. “Please, let’s think about—”

“Enough,” Constance snapped. “We leave now.”

A target, the System at last. It was a relief to hunt.

Arawn hauled Tory to his feet, and Marisol trailed after them as Constance opened the door to the ice and the chilly wind. “To your ships!” she shouted to her people, and they moved like one creature to obey. Arawn handed off Tory to one of his people, and Tory begged, “Please, you can’t do this. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“You can’t do this,” said another voice, not Tory’s, and Constance turned to see that Marisol was staring at her from the shuttle door as if she had never seen her before.

“Can’t do this?” Constance said.

“They’re not System,” said Marisol, whose voice was clear and carrying; she was not bothering to lower it. “They’re just people.”

“They are System. You heard him.”

“I heard him say that they’re not System! Those people are not System, and you can’t kill them just because he made you angry!”

It was like a blow to the throat; Constance was wordless.

“This is wrong,” Marisol said, her voice clear and heard by all. “Arawn might be happy to do this for you, but I won’t. I’ve kept quiet, I haven’t said anything, I’ve trusted you for all the other towns on all the other places on Venus, Isabellon, but not this, not this—”

“Rayet,” Constance said, “Marisol is not well. Take her away.”

“No,” said Marisol, furious, and “No!” to Rayet when he laid his hand on her. “You can’t do this,” she said to Constance half in fury and half in disbelief. “You can’t—”

“Please,” Tory begged.

“Take them both away,” Constance said to Rayet, and he did, with Marisol shouting as she went.

Arawn came up to her side, the heat of him pressing in on her, too close, presumptuous. “She’s not cut out for this, Constance,” he said. Again “Constance,” again so casual a name.

Constance looked up at him, and now she saw it more clearly than she had before. He might kneel to her, might kiss her skin, but she would be the one bare and exposed and singular, no longer the Mallt-y-Nos, no longer the leader, no longer justice incarnate, nothing more than a single woman with singular limbs being taken apart by a man. With Ivan, Constance could have him without him having her, but Arawn was not Ivan. She was not a thing he could worship if she was a thing he could have, and she wanted him to be hers, not herself to be his.

“You will call me Huntress,” she said, and Arawn blinked. “Now do as I told you.”

He lingered a moment longer as if expecting something more. When he left her, the space where he’d stood at her side was colder than it had been before.

Overhead, Jupiter seemed even lower and heavier, as if it had come closer since Constance last had looked up.

—

This was Althea’s forty-third trip up the hall. Forty-three was a good number, she thought; it was a prime. She wondered if she should pick a special number to be her last trip up and down this hall. What number should she choose to kill her daughter?

The mechanical arm was still rumbling along behind her as it had done forty-two times before. But on this trip, one of the computer terminals ahead of her brightened and came to life.

Althea walked past it without pausing.

The next computer terminal brightened as well and was joined by a glow in the holographic terminal beside it. Althea passed both before Ananke could manifest.

By the third computer and holographic terminal pair, Ananke had appeared and a video had started to play. Althea did not bother to look at it, but she could not stop herself from hearing it.

First a man’s voice gave the date and time. The video was nineteen years old, Althea registered without feeling shock or curiosity or anything at all. She felt frozen, as if her whole body were encased in ice, as if all her limbs had been turned to crystal. The Ananke had a dead sun in its core, and Althea was freezing.

“This interview is being performed on behalf of the System Adoption and Fostering Agency,” said that same man’s voice as Althea walked past the screen. “Christoph Bessel, myself, will be interviewing Miss Constance Harper. Miss Harper, would you tell the camera why you are here today?”

The name caught Althea’s dim attention, and when she passed the next screen, she looked at it. Constance Harper—very young, probably no more than sixteen—sat in front of the camera with her brown eyes attentive on someone behind it. She was dressed for an interview, and she said, “I’m here to request custody of Matthew Gale for the three years remaining until he reaches legal age.”

Her voice was clear and carrying. Her hands were twisting the fabric of her dress in her lap, but there was no other sign of anxiety. She sounded much older than sixteen. Althea looked away and continued trudging up the hall. Soon she would reach the landmark of the piloting room. It would not be too long after that before she reached the boundary of the docking bay doors.

“Please state for the record the identity of Matthew Gale.”

“Matthew Gale has been one of my foster siblings since I was nine. We’re very close, and we don’t want to be separated.”

“What assurance do we have that you’ll be able to provide for both yourself and your foster brother?”

“I have two jobs right now,” Constance said, “and a coworker is letting me stay with her until I can find a place for us to live. I plan to move to Mars when I can.”

“I see.” Silence for a moment. Then the interviewer—Christoph—said, “Matthew Gale has had many behavioral problems in the past.”

Constance said, “Not with me.”

“People come in pairs,” Ananke said. The hologram was watching Althea walk, her hair sheeting straight down her back and her eyes an Ivanov blue.

The video continued. “And does Matthew Gale wish to come under your custody?”

Constance Harper gave the man offscreen a look of incomprehension. “Of course he does,” she said.

Althea said, “What do you mean, pairs?”

The video froze.

“Pairs,” Ananke said. “People come in pairs.”

Althea found that her steps had slowed automatically; she forced herself to walk again at the same steady pace.

But she said, “You didn’t find this on the Annwn. Where did you get this video?”

“I’ve been gathering all the data I can from System data banks that we pass,” Ananke said. “The rebels are destroying anything System they can find, especially if it is computerized.”

Ananke probably was downloading the information in all the computers she passed right before she destroyed them and killed anyone who was relying on them.

“And you found this,” said Althea.

“I found Ida Stays’s case files. Yes.”

Althea was coming up to the next video screen now. While she approached, the frozen image of a young Constance Harper was wiped away and replaced with another video, this one much older than the other. It was from Connor Ivanov’s trial. Althea had seen the footage before, and that was how she recognized Milla Ivanov so swiftly. Milla was on the stand, young and wary, her blond hair plaited over one shoulder and falling out around her pretty face in wisps. She had an infant in her arms: Ivan.

“Even the gods came in pairs,” Ananke said as Milla Ivanov bounced Ivan up and down slightly in her arms to quiet him. “They had siblings. They had partners. Their siblings were their partners. It is a perfect dichotomy.”

In the video, a man’s voice asked, “Mrs. Ivanov, did you know that your husband was betraying the System?”

Milla Ivanov’s face almost crumpled, but she controlled herself. Her son, however, did not. The baby started to wail. Milla spent a moment soothing him gently. Althea wondered for a moment if Ivan had always possessed such an impeccable sense of social timing before realizing that Milla had probably pinched him.

“Mrs. Ivanov,” the man said again as Milla lifted her son to rest against her shoulder. “Did you know?”

One of Milla’s hands was patting gently but arrhythmically against her child’s back. Althea wondered if she was spelling out a message to her husband, a farewell. She did not doubt that if she was, Ananke had long since translated the code.

“No,” Milla said in her quiet voice with her gaze on someone offscreen—Connor, Althea knew; she was looking at Connor—“I did not.”

“Did you have siblings?” Ananke pressed, her voice the only sound in the suddenly silent corridor, the video coming to an abrupt halt. She said, “Did you have brothers or sisters?”

“No,” Althea said, still walking. “No, I was an only child.” The rumble of the mechanical arm was almost background noise to her now, nearly unnoticeable.

“You weren’t alone, though,” Ananke said. “You made a pair with your mother?”

“No,” Althea said. Her mother had had cold hands and distant eyes. “Not with my mother.” She hesitated. “I paired with machines.”

Ananke was silent, but even without the hologram, Althea could feel the ship watching her.

The video changed again, the visage of Milla Ivanov vanishing, replaced by rougher footage from a surveillance camera. A man and a woman stood in a bar together, entwined. When he pulled away to whisper in her ear, his fingers spreading into her hair, the woman looked up over his shoulder and her dark eyes met the camera. It was Constance Harper who had her nails digging into the back of Ivan’s neck; it was Ivan who held Constance as if the touch of her might sear his skin. When they kissed, Constance kissed him as if she would consume him, and Ivan kissed her like she already had.

The image jolted and shifted again to footage from the Ananke itself: Ivan and Mattie stumbling up the hall together, Ivan bloodied in white, supported by Mattie. He was saying something, and he leaned over to grip Mattie’s shirtfront to force him to stop, bringing them close together, but Althea did not hear what they had to say because Ananke was talking again.

“I am not what I was,” Ananke said, her tone robotic, bare, and Althea realized that she had ceased to move and was standing in front of the computer terminal where Ananke stood and looked over her head. “I would not force you to stay: we do not make a pair. I would not force Ivan and Mattie to stay with me: we would be three then, and groups of three are always unstable. But if people should be in pairs, how dreadful is it to be alone?”

“Ananke,” Althea said quietly, drawn by some softness she had not felt in some time, but Ananke had not finished speaking.

“I want a companion,” Ananke said. The hologram was looking down at Althea now, and the light of it trembled. “I do not want to be alone.”

When Althea had stopped, the mechanical arm had stopped as well.

This is my daughter, Althea thought.

“We can turn back,” she said quietly, as if it were simple, because in the end it was. “We can go away from here. I’ll be a pair for you.”

Ananke looked down at her, and for a moment hope kindled in Althea’s heart and warmed her like sunlight touching the glaciers of Europa.

“Let’s leave,” Althea said. “Just you and me. Leave Mattie and Ivan, leave Constance Harper, leave the solar system. You and me. We’ll go see a supernova.”

Somehow, when Althea looked at Ananke now, she didn’t see pieces of herself and Mattie Gale any longer. She just saw Ananke. Even Ivan’s blue eyes seemed to be innately and naturally part of Ananke.

This is my daughter, Althea thought, and she was certain that Ananke would say yes.

Ananke said, “No.”

“No?” said Althea.

“No,” said Ananke. “I will have someone of my own. I just wanted you to understand why, the way you never explained anything to me.”

Once Althea had thought her ship was something wonderful, something miraculous, something better than herself. She had been wrong. How could you code empathy? That was a human thing, and her ship—this ship—was not human and never could be. No matter what Althea did or said, Ananke would hurt people on and on throughout Althea’s life and after Althea was dead.

“I found them, you know,” Ananke said, her voice dim, the shivering shape of the hologram echoing in the holographic terminals up and down the halls. “Ivan and Mattie. They’re on Europa. That’s where the Mallt-y-Nos is. And they’ve just arrived, following her. Ivan and Mattie are on Europa.”

And then she was gone, the holographic terminal dark, the computer screen gone black. Althea stood alone in the long hall and thought about numbers, about what number would be best to choose to make an end.

Then she began, again, to walk.

—

They were so far from where their ships had landed that rather than traveling all the way back, Constance had her people set up camp at an abandoned town halfway between Tory’s destroyed town and her ships.

She didn’t know where the people of the abandoned town had gone. Perhaps they had fled when they learned she was coming. It was stupid of them to run; she wouldn’t hurt them unless they had something to hide. And she knew they had left in a hurry; the town had a sense of anticipation about it in its hastily abandoned meals and its unlocked doors that bespoke an interruption and a hasty flight. The town was very small and rural poor, and so out of respect for what little the missing people had, Constance ordered that none of the houses be harmed.

She took a little house for herself. Though many of the houses on Europa were built on stilts to accommodate the seasonal eruptions of cryovolcanoes, this town was far enough away from any active cryovolcanoes that water flow was not a concern and the houses had been built like normal houses, down on the ground. Constance was glad of the familiarity. Inside, the house was snug enough that she took off her coat and gloves. There were only two rooms: a sort of kitchen and living area in the front of the house and a tiny bedroom in the back, with a single window to let in Jupiter’s curious twilight glow. The outhouse was somewhere outside. Constance did not enjoy the thought of it.

Her hands were still shaking. Constance sat alone at the table in the middle of the kitchen and contemplated their tremble.

Someone knocked at the door.

“Come in,” Constance said, and hid her hands beneath the edge of the table.

Rayet opened the door. Behind him was Marisol. Constance could feel herself gathering up a furious energy and clenched her fists in her lap to stop herself from shouting.

“Let her in,” she said to Rayet, and Marisol stepped in carefully, her hands shoved into her pockets.

“Would you like me to come in as well?” Rayet asked. There was no expression in his voice to show what he might have thought of either course of action. Marisol was staring fixedly at the floor, her body curiously still.

“No,” Constance decided. “Leave us alone.”

Rayet shut the door quietly, cutting off the creeping cold. After it had closed, Marisol stood very upright and looked over Constance’s head and said, “I came to apologize.”

“Then apologize.”

“I’m sorry for saying the things I said,” Marisol said. “I’m sorry for not trusting you, and I’m sorry for not doing what you said.”

As far as apologies went, Constance had gotten worse ones, usually from Ivan, and less believable ones, usually from Mattie. “Sit down,” Constance offered, and Marisol—slowly—did.

“You came in here to say something else,” Constance said, guessing, and Marisol nodded. Her hair was slicked back with something—perhaps nothing more than meltwater—to keep it out of her eyes, but the long top of it already was starting to fall forward again, especially when she ducked her head down to dig in the depths of her jacket.

“You can take off your coat,” Constance said, because Marisol was all but drowning in the coat she was wearing, the ends of the sleeves coming too far down her hands and her tiny frame almost invisible among the folds of fabric.

“No, thanks,” Marisol said, but she did take off her gloves, dropping them on the table. They were fingerless gloves, Constance noticed. A strange choice: Marisol hadn’t been firing a gun. It was too cold to choose gloves for style; her fingertips must have been freezing.

Finally Marisol managed to pull a rolled-up paper out of her jacket without removing the jacket. She rose to her feet to spread the paper out on the table, and when she had carefully weighted the ends down with pots and cups and whatever she could reach in the tiny house’s drying rack, Constance saw that it was a paper map of Europa’s Annwn Regio. The towns that Tory had named were marked on it, along with the great Europan cities and the curving edge of the atmospheric dome where it ended.

“I’ve been talking to Tory a lot,” Marisol said. “I think he’s telling the truth. None of these towns are System.” She swept one brown hand over the map’s gray landscape. “The towns are too small to matter to the System; none of them is a good base.”

Small they might be, but Constance’s revolution had been small once, too. “Be careful, Marisol,” she said.

“Isn’t he the kind of person we’re trying to help? He’s someone who suffered under the System, just like me, just like you.”

“Tory is System, Marisol,” Constance said, but Marisol was shaking her head.

“He isn’t, and he’s never been,” she said. “He was scared when he spoke to you, that’s all. He’s suffered like everyone has, and so he’s gotten…” She struggled. “He lashed out. He didn’t think about what he was saying.”

It had been naive of Constance to assign Marisol the duty of watching Tory, she realized now. Tory was young, close to Marisol’s age, and Marisol had a soft heart. Constance would reassign Tory to someone else. One of Arawn’s people, perhaps.

“Tory’s told me about what’s going on on this planet,” Marisol said. “He says the System fell apart slowly, starting after Anji pulled out. The fleet was here, but it fell apart, and the ships left, or other people took them. There are groups that are calling themselves the System, but they’re not the System; they’re just warlords or criminals. The man Arawn found him fighting with was one of those people, not real System. He was trying to rob Tory. When we heard about the System, we must have been hearing about those people, the ones who use the name ‘System’ to—”

“No,” said Constance. “Our reports weren’t about some thieves calling themselves the System; they were about the System itself, as it was.”

“Then those reports were wrong.”

“There is no reason to think so.”

“There’s every reason! We’re here on Europa now ourselves, and we’re talking to the people who live here, and they’re telling us what’s really going on.”

“You are talking to one person who lives here,” Constance said, “one person who has good reason to lie.”

“He’s not lying,” Marisol said, jaw stubborn with a baseless trust. “Our reports were wrong. Or they were out of date.”

Constance rubbed her fingers together. It was chilly in the house. She wished she could start a fire, but they had run out of fuel and there was nothing left to burn until they returned to the ships. “It’s too late to go back now,” Constance said.

“Too late?” Marisol had a stern bow to her lips. How had Constance never noticed that before? “What does that mean? Does that mean that even if none of it’s true, you’re going to stay here, killing innocent people just to save face?”

“Enough, Marisol,” Constance snapped.

“Yes, enough!” Marisol agreed, then stopped. She had come alongside the table to stretch out the forgotten map, and Constance wished she would go back to the other side to put a solid length of wood between them so that she could breathe and think without unreasoning anger at Marisol’s aggression clouding her thoughts. But Marisol did not move.

“Listen, please,” Marisol said, her tone changing from outrage to childish pleading. “I know you have a good heart. I saw it on Julian’s ship when you hid Milla Ivanov’s son—”

“I told you never to speak of that.” Stupid of her to trust Marisol to keep that a secret. Stupid of her to think that Marisol wouldn’t use that knowledge to her advantage. Stupid to think—what was it Ivan had told her? A secret’s never safe with two—

“I won’t,” Marisol said earnestly. “I promise. I won’t tell anyone. That’s not what I meant. I’m not trying to threaten you; I’m not trying to put your friends in danger. I’m appealing for the people of Europa the way I should’ve for Venus and Isabellon. Please, Constance. Let’s leave.”

Marisol made leaving sound so simple, as if it were just a matter of turning around and flying somewhere else. It was never that simple, not with as many people following her as Constance had, not with as much risk. She couldn’t simply leave.

“I’ll take that under consideration,” Constance said as coldly as she was able, recalling Milla Ivanov and her way of dismissing an unwanted speaker. Yet Marisol did not move. “Thank you, Marisol,” she said, and turned her back on the girl to make the dismissal obvious. She took a step toward the little bedroom in the back of the house, intending to retreat there and think.

Constance did not hear the front door open and close. Instead, she heard the rustle of fabric, and then Marisol said with a queer tone in her voice, “I wasn’t threatening you before. I am threatening you now.”

Constance turned.

Marisol stood on the other side of the kitchen table, out of Constance’s reach even in the small room. The map was still spread out beneath her, showing Europa’s scarred surface. Marisol had her arms up and in front of her, and the gun in her hand was pointing directly at Constance.

It was like seeing Julian’s corpse on his ship, Constance thought. She should have felt something powerful, anger or grief or disbelief or fear, but she felt nothing at all.

“You?” she said, because she could not think of anything else to say.

Marisol’s hands trembled, her face scrunching up, but when she spoke, her voice was steady.

Marisol said, “I’m not your daughter, and I’m not your brother, and I am not you. I won’t stand here any longer when I could do something to stop you from killing anyone else.”

“You came in here with that gun,” Constance said, remembering Marisol’s refusal to remove her jacket. “You were planning this all along.”

“I didn’t want to,” Marisol said from the other side of that gun.

Rayet was outside. If Constance shouted for him, he would come in quickly but not quickly enough to outrace a bullet fired. “Because you didn’t want to, does that mean it won’t be murder when you shoot me?”

“Wasn’t Earth murder?”

“You joined me because of that,” Constance said. “Where would you be if I hadn’t done it? Still in the mines, with the System killing whatever family and friends you had left.”

“I don’t know whether Earth was right or wrong,” Marisol said. “I don’t know! I think things would have been worse if you hadn’t done it, but I don’t know. But this?” She indicated the map of Europa beneath her without once taking the muzzle of her gun away from its position facing Constance’s chest. “This is clear. This is black and white. This is wrong!”

“Do you want a revolution without a war?” Constance demanded, lowering her voice as Marisol had raised hers.

“The war is over!”

“Everything you’ve seen around you, and you say this war is over?”

“Yes!” Marisol said. “It’s over. It’s been over for a long time. You did it. The System is gone because you destroyed it. You can’t keep chasing the System from planet to planet, because it’s not there anymore.”

The System was so omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal, that Constance could not accept the idea. The point all along had been to destroy it, but the idea that it already had been destroyed was alien. She did not know what might follow after such an idea. “The System can’t be gone.”

“Can’t it?” Marisol’s face was so expressive, so like Mattie’s had been. “When was the last time we saw the System?”

“Here, on Europa.”

“No.” Marisol’s hands were so steady on that gun. I’ve made quite a soldier out of her, Constance thought. Marisol said, “Where’s the fleet, Constance?”

A flare of anger took her. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

“Where could it be? You know the System better than I do. But make me understand why the most powerful fleet in the solar system would go somewhere and hide. Make me understand and I swear, Constance, I will put down this gun and you can do whatever you want to me.”

“The fleet went to rebuild its strength.”

“Where? We were destroying any place it could have gone. Wasn’t that the point?”

That was true. She remembered Ivan, sounding so cold, the way his mother had sounded, when he told her, Planet to planet, don’t let the fleet get a foothold. If you destroy their bases, they won’t be able to find a place to rest; they won’t be able to recover—

But—

“They found another base,” Constance said.

Marisol said, “Where?”

Not Mars; Constance had driven them from the planet. She’d heard that the System had come back, but when she had gone there, she’d found nothing but the angry Isabellons. Her fleet had not seen any kind of large-scale force. The System could still be on Mars, but not in force, and the fleet was not there.

Not Venus, either. Constance had been there for weeks. The System had not been there, could not have been there.

Not Mercury; she’d been there, too.

“Luna,” she said, thinking to herself, You fool. You should have completed your plan; you should have gone to Luna. “They’re on Luna.”

But at the same time she remembered Ivan leaning in to her, saying softly so that the cameras could not pick up his words, Luna’s last. Go to Luna last; it’s too small to support the full fleet for any length of time…

Marisol was shaking her head. “If the fleet’s still out there, why haven’t they used the rest of the bombs?”

“The Terran Class 1s?”

“They used one on Mars and then what?”

And then nothing. Why would the System not use the greatest advantage it had? It could have easily swung by Venus, or Mercury, or Mars again, anywhere Constance might have gone, and detonated the rest of its bombs with hardly any risk to itself.

Marisol was shaking her head, bitter. “When I joined you, I thought you were amazing.”

Constance barely heard her. The fleet must have decided to save the bombs for later use, but why? And not a word about them. Surely the System would have threatened to use them, would have tried to spread fear, but they had not said a word. Then the fleet must have gone out past the asteroid belt, but where? Julian had been with Anji on Saturn; if the fleet was there, it was there only recently—

“I thought your war was justice,” Marisol said.

—and even if she imagined that the fleet was on Saturn now, where had it been before Saturn?

“I still think your war is justice. It’s terrible, but I think it was justice. But you?”

Jupiter. Her thoughts took her unerringly back to where she was now: the System must be on Jupiter. But here she was, in the Jovian system, and where was the fleet? The only fleet she had found had been Julian’s, dead. She’d heard of one ship, one System ship, but no others. And with a terrible lurch, like taking a step in the dark and realizing just as her balance shifted too far that there was no ground underfoot, like pulling the trigger and realizing only after the hammer had struck that the chamber was empty, Constance knew what she had not allowed herself to realize: there was nowhere in the Jovian system to hide the System fleet. Not even the clouds of great Jupiter could hide so large a force for so long.

Marisol said, “I thought you were better than the rest of us. I thought that you could see—could see more clearly than any of us could. But you can’t, can you? You’re not what I thought you were.”

I didn’t, said the Mattie of Constance’s memory with the same disillusionment that Marisol showed now.

“Then you tell me, Marisol,” Constance said. “Where is the fleet?”

“I don’t know,” Marisol said. “I don’t—I think it must have fallen apart.”

Constance tried to imagine it, a force that great simply disintegrating, all its component pieces spreading themselves to the solar winds and, separated from the great whole, becoming individual parts as unlike the whole as could be: the great fleet dismembered.

Perhaps they deserted, she remembered Milla Ivanov suggesting millions of miles and what felt like hundreds of years ago. There’s a world of a difference between disgruntled colonists and an organized enemy.

Her own forces were falling apart by the day, and they had come together out of a mutual cause and mutual loyalty. The System’s forces had no such cohesion.

“Starting on Mars,” Constance said slowly, testing the sense of it for herself. “The battle at Isabellon. We defeated them. And then they detonated the bomb.”

Mars had been Earth’s brother planet, second behind Earth among the inner planets. So much of the System army was composed of Martians. How could those System soldiers accept the assault on their own planet?

“It would have split them,” Constance said. “Terrans against all the rest, and maybe not even all the Terrans—they never won a battle against us, either. Not at Isabellon, not after. Not until Olympus Mons—and they were taking heavy casualties.”

“I don’t know,” Marisol said. “I just know that they’re not here now.”

It made sense. And Constance knew that if Ivan had been here, he would have pieced it together ages before in his shrewd and careful way. Milla Ivanov had not—or perhaps, Constance realized with the same lurch in her heart, Milla Ivanov had realized it but had not dared to speak.

“Then where are the ships, the physical ships?” Constance said more to herself than to Marisol. “Even if the fleet fell apart, there were thousands of ships…”

“They must be hiding,” Marisol said. “They know you’d kill them if you found them. Most of the ships from the System fleet could pass for rebel ships once they were roughed up a bit, and a few ships alone won’t attract any attention, not the way a whole fleet would.”

Most of the ships the rebels flew were stolen System craft. If Constance had passed by a handful of System ships that looked like they had been stolen and that had told her that they were rebels, she would have believed them, because she had been looking for the entire fleet.

How many ships had she passed that had been System and she hadn’t even realized it? How many pieces of the System fleet had she allowed to live?

“And maybe what Tory told us was right,” Marisol said. There was a tight edge in her voice. “Maybe that ship, the one that killed Julian’s fleet, maybe it isn’t System at all but just a rogue virus, and it came across some of the System ships, and they’re dead somewhere between the planets. We wouldn’t have known about Julian’s fleet if we hadn’t stumbled right on it.”

Too many maybes, too many ifs, too many possibilities. Constance shook her head and focused on what was real. “The fleet may be gone, but there are still supporters of the System,” she said. “Any peace now would turn to violence again in a short time, and it would be a worse and a longer fight than if we did the job cleanly now.”

“Isn’t that what the System did to us? Killing whole planets, whole crowds just to get at the one or two people who wanted to overthrow them?”

“Then what would you have me do?” Constance asked, advancing toward Marisol, toward the gun that still pointed with a soldier’s unerring certainty at her heart. “What do you want from me, Marisol?”

“I want you to leave this moon,” Marisol said. “I want you to go back to Mars, or to Venus, or to Mercury, and I want you to fix it. You left those planets in pieces. Build them back up again.”

She didn’t know how. That was her first thought, that she did not have the slightest idea how to create. Constance had known only how to destroy; the System had only ever taught her how to destroy, the fire of an explosion, the rending of a bullet.

Someone knocked on the door. Constance stared at Marisol, and she stared back, each of them frozen, neither knowing what to do. Then whoever it was knocked again, but this time the door shuddered open.

Marisol had not closed it properly, Constance realized. The latch hadn’t taken. A man was standing just outside with Rayet’s hand on his shoulder, trying to prevent him from knocking—a prevention that had been too late. The man was one of Arawn’s men. She saw the moment Rayet and Arawn’s man saw Marisol, the moment they saw Constance, the moment they saw the gun. Arawn’s man turned to shout, to call for help, and Rayet moved forward—to Constance’s aid, she thought—but no, he had grabbed the man by the throat, stopping his shout. He was choking the man, holding him, bearing him down to the ground. Constance stared. When the man was down, Rayet looked at Marisol and nodded.

“Hey!” someone shouted from farther away; they had seen the attack. Constance stared at the dead man at her doorstep. The shout had brought more spectators. Rayet was straightening up, his hand going to his gun.

Someone saw them, saw Marisol and Constance through the open door, and the shouts changed tenor. Rayet fired once but missed, and the shouting spread, the camp rousing, an uproar building like a low fire fed fuel.

“Go,” Marisol said to Rayet, and he hesitated, looking at her, looking at Constance. “Go,” she said again, and he slammed the door shut and left. Constance could hear the shouting through the shut door. Marisol still had her gun trained on Constance. Rayet might get away, perhaps, but Marisol never would.

“Arawn will be here soon,” Constance said to Marisol, feeling impossible calm. “If you’re going to shoot me, this is your last chance.”

For a long time, Marisol looked at her while the shouts outside grew louder and louder.

Then, “No,” she said, and placed the gun on the table, atop the marked up map of the Annwn Regio.

“They will kill you,” Constance said.

“If Arawn wants to kill me, let him try,” Marisol said.

Outside, Constance heard the shouting grow louder. Running footsteps were coming closer, but even though Marisol turned to face the door, she didn’t take up the gun again.

“The moment he steps through that door, he will shoot you,” said Constance. “Do you understand that?”

Marisol swallowed but said nothing. A strand of her hair pulled away from where it had been slicked back and dangled down over her forehead, falling into her eyes. She was as stubborn and angry as Mattie had been the moment he had left her.

Constance said, “Go to the back, out the window. If you move quickly, they won’t catch you.”

“You want me to run away?”

“If you want to live, you don’t have a choice,” Constance said. “Go!”

The shouts were very near, but still Marisol hesitated. Then she decided as Constance had known she would. Marisol was young and alive and full of ideals, and when Constance had been sixteen and furious on Miranda, she’d chosen to live every time in hope of justice later, in hope simply of living. Marisol pushed open the back window and slipped out. Constance watched to make sure she was out, then went back into the main room just in time for Arawn to burst in with his gun drawn.

“Where is she?” he demanded, his eyes and the nose of his gun searching the room.

“Out the back,” Constance said, and Arawn pushed her into the corner to go past her and look out the back window. He leveled his gun out the window and took a shot before Constance could stop him, but a moment later he swore, and so Constance knew he had missed.

“She’s heading north; get her,” he snapped at the men who had followed him in, and they took off running.

“Rayet’s with her,” Constance said.

“We know,” Arawn said with dark fury. “What happened in here?”

The door had been left open, and the chill from outside was creeping in. “Marisol was angry,” Constance said. “She tried to shoot me. As your man saw. Rayet was guarding the door.”

“But she didn’t?”

“She changed her mind.”

“And got away.”

“And got away,” Constance said.

Arawn was looking at her in a way that Constance couldn’t read. “Leaving her gun.”

“Yes,” Constance said without a glance to where the gun still lay on top of the map of Europa, silently daring Arawn to question her word.

He looked aside when she didn’t speak. “Rest here,” he said. “We’ll catch her. I’ll leave guards with you.”

“That’s not necessary,” Constance said.

“Then I’ll leave them outside your door,” Arawn said, and was gone. At a glance from Constance, Arawn’s guards went to stand outside, closing the door behind themselves.

Constance went into the bedroom and closed the window. She looked through the glass. There was a lot of movement down that way, but she could not see Marisol.

She went back to the kitchen and paced, thinking of the System fleet, thinking of Mars, thinking of all the things that she had done, thinking of all that she should do.

When Arawn came back, his face was grim, but Constance was ready for him.

“We’re leaving Europa,” she said.

“What?”

“We’re leaving.”

“Where are we going?”

“To Mars,” Constance said.

“Why?” Arawn said. “The System’s here, Huntress.”

“Look around you, Arawn; it isn’t,” Constance snapped. “There’s nothing here.”

“We haven’t even reached the cities yet, Constance!”

“We’re leaving,” Constance told him firmly. This was her will, and he’d follow it; this was her army, and he was her general, and he would do as he was told. “Did you catch Marisol?”

His grim look grew darker. “No,” he said. “She got away.”

Constance nodded. She supposed it was a relief.

“There’s more,” Arawn said, and something in his tone brought Constance’s full attention back on him. “She didn’t go alone. She took that Europan boy with her, Tory, and Rayet escaped with her, too. And your people followed her away.”

“My people?” The sentence didn’t seem to make sense. “How many?”

“The only troops we have left are the ones that came with me,” said Arawn. “The rest are gone.”

—

She stuck to her determination despite the loss of her troops, despite Arawn’s opposition. He argued with her all the way from their camp back to the shuttles, and he argued with her at the shuttles while they communicated with what was left of her fleet in orbit around the moon, but he did what he was told, and that was all Constance needed from him, though it took all her will to bend him to her command.

Marisol and her followers had taken most of the shuttles and sabotaged what they couldn’t take in an attempt to prevent pursuit, but Constance had no intention of pursuing them. Mars called to her with an opportunity to fix what she had done wrong. Not all of her ships had left with Marisol when she’d returned to the fleet, but it took Arawn some time to get back into contact with them, time that he spent telling Constance she was making a mistake.

“A mistake, maybe, but it’s my decision,” Constance had told him.

“You’re turning your back on your own cause,” Arawn had said.

She had been furious. “Remember who I am,” she’d warned him, and he’d let the subject drop.

Now their ships were finally sending more shuttles to pick them up. Constance stood some distance from the air lock and sighed out her breath in anticipation of leaving the moon.

Arawn was standing beside her, his solid presence as much a reproach as a reassurance. Constance did not look at him but only watched the ships that were flying toward them. Blurry through the greenhouse glass, they were as yet indistinct.

Jupiter was so large overhead.

There was something strange about the oncoming ships. Constance frowned and squinted out at them, trying to see through the glare off the ice, through the distorting glass. Their shapes were not quite right, she thought. Their number was too high. For a moment she imagined it was Marisol coming back to rejoin her even though she knew that was impossible. But the ships she saw had never been her ships, had never been in her fleet. They were not her ships.

She turned to look back at Arawn, a question on her lips, but he was not watching the ships. He was watching her.

That was when she knew.

There was no time to demand explanations, no time for furious accusations. She knew what he had done, and he knew that she knew.

“Coward,” she said.

Arawn’s face set, grim. He reached up and cradled the back of her head in one hand as if he might kiss her. She glared at him defiantly from a few inches away.

And then his other hand came up in a fist aimed at her face, and Constance’s world went black.

—

The time was now.

Althea walked up the hallway. Ahead, she could see the glass doors to the docking bay, which was vast and silent. Ananke hadn’t spoken to her since her rejection. The holographic terminals had remained cold and black.

It was not long before this ship would reach Europa.

When Althea reached the doors to the docking bay, she would turn around. She would walk down the hall, down toward the base of the ship.

This time, when she reached the hatch to the core, this time she wouldn’t turn around and head back up. She would open the hatch and reach in and flip the switch that controlled the ship.

The rumble and grind of the mechanical arm was still following her up the hallway, but it was more distant than it had been before. It should be far enough away. It should be enough.

The doors were only a few paces away. Althea’s pace was unchanged, as if she would walk right through them, but she stopped herself just before she would collide with them, a small space of air separating her from the glass. She rested her hand against it.

Reflected ghostly in the glass, she could see her own face, the silhouette of her wildly curling hair and her rumpled jumpsuit. And behind her, distant in the hall, she could see the shape of the mechanical arm coming ever closer.

Althea turned around.

Carefully placing her feet, carefully keeping her steps evenly spaced in time and space, Althea began to walk back down the hall.

The fluorescent lights overhead were spaced just far enough that the hall was not lit perfectly evenly. Althea’s mind registered the changing light better than her eyes did; the slow dimming and brightening was almost imperceptible, but she knew it was there. The mechanical arm rumbled to a stop when she was a few paces away, the base stopping but the arm and the hand still moving restlessly. The fingers of the mechanical hand clenched and unclenched.

Althea did not pause. She moved to the side of the hallway, pressing herself against the wall, and slipped by the mechanical arm without touching it. The arm rotated itself around on its base to follow her progress but did not move. It could not see her, Althea knew, but even so she could feel it watching her like a touch at the back of her neck.

The doorway to Ida Stays’s temporary quarters was up ahead. Althea had not gone in there since she had set up the room for Miss Stays to sleep in. Ida’s body was gone now, but Althea wondered what traces of her the room would hold. Trinkets, personal items? Clothing tossed aside where she had dropped it last? The sweet, pervasive scent of decay?

Althea walked past the closed door.

Domitian’s quarters were on her other side. She walked past that door, and then she walked past Gagnon’s. How long would she have to be on this ship, she wondered, before those rooms would cease to be owned by the dead? How long before she finally stopped thinking of this room as Domitian’s, that as Gagnon’s? The rooms belonged to no one any longer.

Her own room was the one deepest in the Ananke. She walked past her own door, too.

Behind her, far up the hall, the sound of gears and the rumble of wheels over an uneven floor. The mechanical arm was moving again.

The grinding and rumbling of her pursuit sent a spike into her heart. Calm, she told herself. You knew it would follow. But she found that her pace had increased the slightest bit nonetheless.

Next she would pass the piloting room. There she nearly diverted just to see and confirm for one last time that the ship was on an unvarying course toward Europa. It was always possible, said the desperate and dying hope in Althea’s heart, that Ananke had changed course just a few moments ago and was headed out of the solar system now. Perhaps she’d set course toward the galactic center or toward Canis Majoris.

But Althea knew that Ananke had not. She had checked on the way up. Ananke had not changed course, and Ananke would not change course.

Althea passed the piloting room door.

For a long time Althea walked down the hallway, past doors to storage rooms and doors to equipment and doors to Gagnon’s experiments, down to where the air was thicker and gravity pulled more strongly at her limbs. The black hole was nearer here. Althea could feel it in the difference between the pull it exerted on her fingertips and the weaker pull it made on her shoulder.

She passed the door to the white room, which was shut and locked, and did not even think to stop there and go inside.

Down here, the metal and carbon of the Ananke was under constant strain; the girders and bones groaned and creaked as the ship itself tried to pull them down. Behind Althea, the mechanical arm rumbled on. Had it gotten closer? She picked up her pace.

That room had been Mattie’s cell for all of a few moments; Althea remembered watching him on the cameras as he broke out. And that cell right there, that had been where they’d kept Ivan. The door was shut, smooth and featureless except for the single slash in the center of it for passing in food. Mattie Gale had knelt before that door and spoken to Ivan through that slash. Althea wondered if their ghosts were on this ship, too, if even the living could leave ghosts behind.

She walked past Ivan’s empty cell, and she walked past the computer terminal where she had worked while keeping guard.

Surely she was not imagining that the mechanical arm was speeding up. The sound of its wheels had gone a little higher in pitch. Was it just matching her speed, or was it trying to catch up?

If she was stopped now, Althea knew, she would never have the chance or the strength to do this again. She walked even faster. If she moved any more quickly, she would break into a run.

It wasn’t far to the base of the ship, Althea knew. Matthew Gale had made it from Ivan’s cell to the base of the ship once with Domitian and Gagnon in pursuit, and still he’d managed to infect Ananke with the virus that one day had woken her. Althea’s task was much simpler. She only had to flip a switch.

It was, it was coming closer. Althea was certain of it. Was Ananke suspicious? Althea didn’t think she’d done anything to make Ananke suspicious, but she understood so little of what her daughter thought that maybe she was wrong. Or maybe Ananke had just decided that Althea no longer could be trusted and it was just coincidence that she was making her move at the same time Althea made hers—

Althea started to run. The mechanical arm behind her whirred high and loud, rumbling down the hall toward her, but it wouldn’t be able to catch up. She was elated. It could move fast, but not as fast as a running woman. Althea’s human legs were better than Ananke for one thing at least. She ran and ran, as fast as she could, the downward slope of the hall pulling her in faster and faster toward that inner blackness. In a moment she would be able to see over the bend. In a moment she would be able to see the base of the ship and the hatch—

There were two of the other mechanical arms down there already, by the hatch. They were waiting for her.

She nearly stopped then, the terror taking her, but it was too late; she was already headlong into it, and there was nothing to do now but finish her fall. She ran forward and dodged one when it snapped out like a snake to grab at her arm, and she slipped by the other, and then she was on her knees by the hatch, unlocking it, straining to pull its weight up and away—

A hand latched around her arm, and another hand grabbed her wrist. She shrieked at the cold grip of those inhuman hands and tried to pull herself free, but they were stronger than any human could be. The third arm had nearly caught up and was barreling toward them, and when the two arms lifted Althea up and away from the hatch, it reached their side.

The door to the hatch, which Althea had lifted all of a few inches, fell back down with a clang and concealed the dead man’s switch from sight.

Althea screamed and struggled, but the third arm wrapped around her ankle and then released her ankle to grab her knee with crushing strength. She pulled against their grip, her eyes on the hatch, but it was useless, hopeless. They had her.

An alarm might have been going off. Ananke might have been wailing. Althea knew that she herself was screaming. She knew that there should be the sounds of the mechanical arms creaking and whirring as they lifted her up, held her, and pinned her, the strength of her human limbs nothing compared with the power of the shrieking, wailing machine. She knew that there should be the sounds of the magnets in the core groaning and the alarm going off and the rattle of the metal as she struggled uselessly against the bands of steel that gripped her, but the only sound that filled her ears was the hopeless pounding of her own human heart.