FORWARD
Ivan wasn’t dead. Mattie tightened his grip on Ivan and moved as quickly as he could across the Ananke’s deck.
Somewhere behind him was that mechanic with the curly hair, Althea Bastet. Ivan had managed to talk her down, but Mattie half suspected that she would change her mind before they could reach his ship and shoot them in the back.
Let her try, he thought with sudden wildness; let her turn that gun on them, let her try to take them down now.
Abandoned ships stood like tombstones in the Ananke’s docking bay. To Mattie’s right was his and Ivan’s old ship, the Annwn, torn open and inoperable; to his left was the bullet-shaped vessel that bitch Ida Stays had flown in. Mattie would have liked to light it on fire and let it burn out on the Ananke’s deck.
There was no time for that now. He guided Ivan into his new ship, the Copenhagen, and took a moment to ease him down onto the mattress in the cabin, one hand catching Ivan’s head when it dipped on his neck.
Ivan stared up at him, his blue eyes turned to black in the dimness of the cabin. Mattie left him to close the hull door and jog onto the piloting platform, hitting the controls to wake the computer from its watchful stillness.
The Copenhagen had only one main room; cabinets lined the walls, an elevated platform separated the piloting area from the rest of the room, and a mattress had been shoved flush to the wall. Behind him, Mattie heard Ivan breathing, the exhalations too evenly spaced to be anything but deliberately timed. He must be counting in his head.
With a roar and a rumble, the engine ignited; the floor underfoot began to shudder. The docking bay doors were not opened—couldn’t open yet; the room had to depressurize first—but he couldn’t be certain they would open. That mechanic might stop them. She was more unpredictable than she’d seemed at first if even Ivan couldn’t get a total handle on her. And even if Althea Bastet decided to let them go, there was still the Ananke.
The virus that Mattie had put into the Ananke’s computer had grown worse somehow. He wasn’t certain how the ship had “decided” to contact him and let him know of Ivan’s danger. He wasn’t certain what had happened to the ship while he had been gone. But whatever had happened, two things were certain: the ship was unpredictable, and the ship was dangerous. Mattie was getting himself and Ivan the hell away from it.
Overhead, the docking bay doors to the Ananke began to open.
Mattie had the Copenhagen’s thrusters on in a moment, the ship lifting off. Behind him, he heard Ivan’s harsh-edged breaths. They could make it now, he told himself, even if the mechanic and the machine changed their minds. They could make it—
The docking bay doors did not close again, and in a moment the Copenhagen had passed out into the open stars.
Mattie let his head hang, let some of the tension slacken from his shoulders. Behind him, he heard Ivan’s breathing hitch, then resume its carefully measured count.
Mattie lifted his head, squared his shoulders, and quickly punched in his prearranged course. They were out, but they still had to get away. The Copenhagen began to pick up speed—
A burst of static grabbed him like a hand around the throat. Mattie lifted his hands from the computer as if it might bite him. The static burst quieted, the sound of it localizing to the communications equipment at Mattie’s side.
“Good-bye,” said the communications in what sounded like the voice of a young girl.
It was the voice of a girl who did not exist. The voice had been entirely manufactured by whatever disease had warped the functions of the spaceship Ananke.
Mattie reached out and shut the communications equipment down.
BACKWARD
Two days before Mattie dragged Ivan off the Ananke, Mattie Gale walked into his foster sister’s bar and found her standing on a chair, digging a camera out of the wall with her nails.
He did not know what he expected to see when he entered the room—maps and weapons strewn over the bar’s faux-wood tables, maybe, or an army of people gathered to listen raptly to the gospel of the Mallt-y-Nos. But the bar was clean and bare and completely empty except for Constance, who had dragged one chair out of the tidy arrangement of chairs and tables on the main floor so that she could use it as a step stool. Mattie pushed his hands down into his pockets and let the door to the kitchen swing shut behind him.
Her fingers tore at the crumbling plaster of the wall, digging around for wires. She had pulled nearly all of the camera’s hidden structure from the wall, and the camera as exposed was larger than it had appeared when it had been embedded in the house. The metallic structures that had anchored it and the wires that had powered it had a dark and twisted look to them. Surely by now most, if not all, of the camera had been exorcised from the wall, yet Constance kept digging with single-minded intensity, plaster flaking beneath her nails.
Constance said, “What is it?”
The lighting in the bar was so dim in comparison to the sunlight out the windows that Constance was nearly a silhouette, but Mattie felt that he had never seen her so clearly.
He said, “I guess I was stupid not to realize it before.”
The relentless digging of her fingers stilled.
“It’s not like you didn’t tell me outright,” Mattie said. “It’s not like Milla didn’t tell me. I guess I’ve been pretty stupid, haven’t I?”
For a moment she was sepulchral, the light gleaming off the extended edge of her arm like sunlight in eclipse. Then with a swift yank Constance pulled the camera from the wall. Metal and plaster snapped, and it came out in her hand trailing wires like optical nerves. She stepped down from the chair and placed the camera on the nearest table, then dusted plaster from her palms in silhouette against the sun outside. Every continuing second of silence from her confirmed Mattie’s fears, and something unbelieving and dark swelled inside him.
When she had clapped the last of the dust from her fingers, Constance straightened her neck. “Mattie,” she said, and Mattie heard that old “be reasonable, Mattie” voice she’d used on him ever since they’d been children, “we can’t go back for the dead.”
A terrible and unfamiliar pressure had been building in Mattie’s limbs for the past week. It thrummed in him like an engine starting up.
“If we go back to find him—his body—then everything that he did for us will be undone.” He could not see her expression against the glare of the sun behind her. “I loved him, too. But he—”
“We can’t go back? Because he’s dead, we shouldn’t bother?”
“Dead men can’t suffer, Mattie.”
“You don’t know he’s dead!” Days of frustration, of fear, drew him to advance on her. “None of that should matter, Constance! We’re your family!”
She flared up then as he’d known she would, a sudden and flashing rage. “Don’t you think I know that? Do you think this was easy for me?”
“Yeah, Connie,” he said. “That’s what scares me.” He could see her face more clearly now that they were closer together, and he looked for any sign that she was flinching from his words. Unbelievably, she looked at him as unyieldingly and hard as she might look at a System soldier who hated her.
“There are better things to be scared of,” said Constance.
“Like what’s happening to Ivan right now?”
“Nothing is happening to Ivan. Nothing can happen to Ivan; he’s dead.”
“So there’s no one around to tell you not to do whatever you want.”
“Be quiet,” Constance said.
“And how the fuck do you even know he’s dead for sure? Did you see him die?”
“The System had him. When the news about Earth—”
“When the news about Earth reached them, they’d just kill him,” said Mattie. “So if we’d gone earlier, he’d still be alive. That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Enough!”
“Family doesn’t leave family behind,” Mattie said. “Fine, so you never really loved him. But what if I asked you to go back for him?”
Constance’s jaw set. He knew that face; she had been the core of his life since he had been seven, and he had never hated the sight of anything as much as he hated her in that moment.
He said, “Do you even care about anyone else at all?”
Her lips curled up, teeth baring for a terrible second before she said, “You want to pretend now that you haven’t been with me every step of the way, that you haven’t been a part of this since we were children? Focus, Mattie. You’re as deep in this as I am.”
“I’m not talking about your goddamn revolution. I’m talking about Ivan.”
“You want to choose Ivan over the revolution,” Constance said with that ring of the absolute, the divinely and completely true, that only Constance could speak. “No. The revolution has to be first, and the billions of people who suffer. I have to do anything that I need to make sure this succeeds even if it hurts me, and Ivan knew that from the minute he got involved with me.”
“I didn’t,” Mattie said.
Constance fell silent.
There was a terrible recoil in Mattie’s chest, as if a string had been snapped. A part of him wanted to take back his words, to rewind to what they had been before, Mattie and Connie, brother and sister and full of hope and wild dreams. But then he remembered Ivan in his tiny cell on the Ananke, and he did not take his words back.
“Then go,” Constance said. “Take a ship, some supplies, whatever you think you need.”
Mattie could not force any words past his jaw. He found he could nod, and once he had, he turned to go.
“Mattie.”
He turned. There stood his sister, a silhouette against the sun, tall, with her proud shoulders straight and her proud chin lifted. He could not see her face.
She said, “Whether or not you find him, Anji will be at Callisto. She can send you back to me. Rendezvous with her in a week’s time—she’ll be there.”
He left his sister standing alone in her bar with the sunlight bright behind her and a hole in the wall above her head.
FORWARD
No sooner had the star that was the Ananke vanished from the Copenhagen’s sensors than something new came to take its place. Mattie eyed the sparks of distant light and weighed his prospects: bluff, or fight, or run away.
Behind him, he heard the rustling of fabric. “Don’t sit up, you idiot,” he snapped. “You have a bullet hole in your leg; lie down—”
“She’s following us,” Ivan said, and there was then in his voice as there sometimes was an otherworldly certainty, as if he knew something no one else could possibly have told him. It chilled Mattie, and even with the three ships glimmering in the distance he twisted around to look at him. Ivan was seated, his skin gone gray in the Copenhagen’s pallid light, a feverish shine to his eyes. He was wearing hospital garb, a shirt and loose pants, that once had been white but now was stained all over with brown blood. He did not look otherworldly or knowing. He looked sick.
“Lie down,” Mattie told him.
“We’re too big of an advantage to lose,” Ivan said, in wavering imitation of his usual calm tone. “That’s how she’ll see it.”
Those three ships were coming fast: relativistic drives, comparable in speed to the Copenhagen. Impossible to tell at this distance whether they were System or revolutionary. Mattie cut the Copenhagen’s engines. The rumble overhead changed tenor and the ship jerked once, slightly, as its steady acceleration was cut off.
“She won’t understand. She’ll have to—”
“Shh,” Mattie said, and closed all the ship’s remaining open vents.
“What’s wrong?”
“There’re some other ships out there. I’m trying to trick them into passing us by.”
“Ananke.”
“No! System, I think.” All the Copenhagen’s heat sources had been dimmed or concealed. They no longer would show up like a star on the other ships’ sensors. Mattie eyed those distant lights and hoped they would mistake him for an asteroid.
There was no reason to be quiet; the other ships couldn’t possibly hear them. Mattie found himself moving quietly anyway, in the grip of some old human instinct. He left the piloting platform and crouched down beside where Ivan was staring fixedly out at nothing.
“Hey.” Mattie tapped Ivan’s cheek to get his attention. He got it immediately, and it held, as if Ivan’s attention were a grappling hook that he had thrown into Mattie and now he was somewhere clinging to the other end.
“Stay right there,” Mattie told him, and bent down to peel away the sodden fabric of Ivan’s pants.
Beneath was a mess of red and black. Mattie’s gut clenched: the black of infection winding through the wound. He’d come with medical supplies but nothing that could—
Then the tip of his finger brushed against a curve of black. It stood up from the torn skin: thread, not infection.
The beat of his heart struck too strongly, as if with every contraction it threatened to tear itself from its connecting veins and arteries and fall out from beneath his ribs. Someone had shot Ivan, a glancing blow but damaging. If it had been straight on, he probably would have lost the leg. And then someone had stitched up the wound, but then someone else—or possibly the same someone—had gone and with some blunt item split the stitches again. It was an ugly wound, all torn edges, and it was still bleeding. When it healed, it would twist the muscle unless Mattie could get Ivan to a System medical chamber.
They had no chance of finding a safe medical chamber during a war. Mattie twisted around, opened a cabinet in the wall, pulled out a towel, and pressed down against Ivan’s leg. It swiftly soaked through with red.
“Where’s Constance?” Ivan’s voice was uneven. Mattie wished he could give him something, but he was afraid of how any drug would interact with whatever was already in Ivan’s system.
“She’s on Callisto,” Mattie said, and began to try to pick the surgical thread out of the wound. That only made it bleed more.
“Callisto—”
“We’re on our way there now. Don’t you remember?”
Ivan stared at him. His eyes were blue again, the pupils pinpricks, too small for the light available. Mattie held his leg in place and pressed.
From up on the piloting platform, the communications chimed.
Ivan smiled. “Found us.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No,” Ivan agreed.
The communications chimed again. Mattie twisted around to see the viewscreen. The ships he’d seen far off were closer now, flying in formation: System ships.
Damn it.
Mattie’s hands were smeared to the wrists with blood now and if he moved that high watermark might rise, but if they got shot down, Ivan would lose more than a leg. Mattie hauled Ivan into a sitting position—Ivan’s fingers grabbed at his arm, startled, cold—and propped him up against the wall. Mattie grabbed both of Ivan’s hands and guided them to the sodden towel on his thigh.
“Press here,” he urged. Where he’d grabbed Ivan to haul him up, Mattie had left the imprint of his hands in Ivan’s blood.
The communications chimed again. Mattie left Ivan and opened up the radio.
“Identify yourself,” a Terran voice crackled over the radio immediately.
Mattie cleared his throat. “This is the civilian ship Copenhagen. We were on our way home to Callisto when—”
“Explain why there is no System surveillance equipment on your ship.”
On the viewscreen, the ships had come closer. Behind Mattie, Ivan had leaned his head against the wall, eyes shut, hands resting—not pressing—on the growing stain over his leg.
Fuck it.
Mattie brought the engine back to life.
BACKWARD
Two days after the fall of Earth and a little over an hour before Mattie left his sister standing alone in her bar, Mattie went looking for Milla Ivanov. He wanted to speak to her before he spoke to Constance. With Ivan’s grieving mother at his back, Constance would have to hasten whatever plans she had for his rescue.
He found Milla in the kitchen of Constance’s bar, a set of headphones pressed to her ears and a furrow between her pale brows. She must have been aware he was there or else she was even better at hiding her reactions than he’d expected, because she showed no surprise at all when he sat down across from her.
She lifted one finger to keep him silent, listening closely to whatever was coming through the radio, and Mattie took the time to study her. Anji had exclaimed over Milla’s physical similarity to her son and even Christoph had commented on their family resemblance, but Mattie barely saw it. They were both pale and fine-boned, but so were many people.
At long last, Milla lowered her finger. She lifted the headphones from her ears and laid them across her neck. When they were thus exposed, thin sounds escaped from the earpieces and traveled indistinct and inarticulate to Mattie’s ears. Milla said, “Constance is in her bar.”
“I know.” Mattie nodded at the headphones and the radio. “What are you doing?”
“Listening to System broadcasts.” Milla had a peculiar, piercing gaze. Mattie smiled disaffectedly at her—one of Ivan’s tricks for deflecting attention—and she blinked and glanced away.
“Aren’t there other people doing that?”
“Very many,” Milla said. “But none of them have the experience with the System that I do.” She spoke with a careful lack of inflection. Mattie wondered what she would do if he reached over the table and shook her furiously.
“Heard anything good?”
One of Milla’s pale fingers drummed a quick beat against the table. “The System government is still in chaos. Their highest-ranking officials are all dead or missing. They don’t know who’s in charge, and they can’t get themselves together to attack.”
For a moment Mattie felt a vicious sense of satisfaction at the news. The System in disarray, the System in trouble; finally, he felt as Constance must feel.
It faded so suddenly and swiftly that it left him wrong-footed. “That is good,” he said around the curious charred numbness left behind by the passage of the brief joy.
“It is,” Milla agreed. “But that’s not why you’re here.”
“How could you tell?”
Milla Ivanov was not the kind of woman who would miss the edge to Mattie’s question, but she answered as if she had. “You should be in with your sister, planning the revolution you’ve ignited,” she said. “Instead, you came to find me.”
“You don’t sound like you approve.”
“You shouldn’t have started a revolution you weren’t willing to finish.”
Mattie leaned onto the table and said directly, “Constance hasn’t said anything about rescuing Ivan.”
“No. She hasn’t.”
Mattie waited, but Milla simply sat and looked at him, the thin and far-off voices of frightened System soldiers coming tinnily through her headphones.
Mattie said, “Isn’t that something we should do soon?”
“Constance will direct us.”
“Oh, right,” Mattie said with a bitterness he hadn’t known he’d felt. “Connie calls the shots. We don’t get to think. We just wait until she tells us what to do.” It was shocking how natural Ivan’s words felt on his tongue.
“What do you want?” Milla asked abruptly. “There can be no rescue. My son is dead.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know something of System captivity. Leon is dead.”
She spoke with cold and eerie certainty. Mattie had heard Ivan’s stories of her, but he had hardly understood them before. Now he said, “What the hell kind of mother are you?”
Milla blinked once. Her fingers twitched a fleeting beat against the table. She did not, Mattie thought, look anything like Ivan at all.
“If you want to go find my son’s body, it’s not me you should speak to,” she said.
“I see that,” Mattie snapped, and stood. If he did reach across the table and shake her, he decided, she wouldn’t react. She must have spent so long pretending not to feel anything that the lie had become truth.
“Your husband’s dead, too, isn’t he?” Mattie asked as he pushed his chair in with a screech of metal against tile. Even that sound made no mark against the diamond surface of Milla Ivanov. “Connor Ivanov died on Earth when Constance set off the bombs.”
“Yes,” Milla said without hesitation, without grief or guilt. “He did.”
He stopped before he reached the door to the main bar. “If Constance says yes,” Mattie said, “would you come with me?”
“There would be nothing to find.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
For a moment she did not answer.
Then Milla Ivanov said, “No.”
FORWARD
Mattie’s initial estimate of the other ships had been right: they were fast. He jerked the Copenhagen off course as fast as the engines could go, but the other ships were tight on his tail. He might be able to outrun them eventually, but they had another advantage on the Copenhagen: firepower.
“I’m sorry,” Ivan said after the first bomb detonated not far off Mattie’s port side and rocked the ship.
“What for?”
Ivan’s voice was unsteady. “I shouldn’t have gone.”
“You didn’t go anywhere. I went somewhere,” Mattie said, then swore at some length as one of the other three ships put on a burst of speed and gained distance on him.
“We should have stayed.”
“Sure,” Mattie said. “Are you putting pressure on that leg?” He dared to glance around and saw Ivan lift up his bloody hands to squint at them.
“Put pressure,” said Mattie, and changed their course again, directing them toward the empty space between Neptune and the sun, “on that leg.”
A chase in the openness of space was a battle of distances. There was no point in Mattie trying to double back or make sudden turns: there was nowhere to hide and so much distance between him and his pursuit that they could easily take his movements into account. But if he flew the Copenhagen into the void between planets, perhaps the System would become uninterested and leave him for better prey.
“The towel is soaked.”
“So use the blanket!” The Copenhagen was rattling with the force he was getting from the engines; he had a sudden, terrible image of their engines blowing and leaving them stranded. “I have to pilot the ship right now, so you need to do this for me, right? You need to stay conscious and try to see if you can stop that bleeding.”
“She won’t blow us up.”
“I think he would,” Mattie said as another bomb went off directly behind them and jarred the Copenhagen’s centripetal gravity.
“She needs us,” Ivan said. For a second he sounded so rational that Mattie was reassured; the next words out of his mouth put to rest that moment of peace. “Ananke won’t blow us up.”
“God damn—Ivan, the Ananke is not following us. Althea Bastet let us go; do you remember?”
“Althea let us go. Ananke did not.”
The next bomb went off even closer than the others. The blast of it knocked the Copenhagen askew, sending the edge of the instrumentation ledge painfully into the space under Mattie’s ribs. He pulled them out of their spiral, but the engine display on the computer before him was edging yellow.
If he pushed the relativistic engines too hard, he and Ivan would be trapped traveling at impulse only. It would take them years to get between planets.
He cut the relativistic engines and hoped that the speed they’d built up so far would be enough to keep them ahead.
Behind him on the mattress, Ivan was trying to push himself back upright. “Stay still,” Mattie said, and then left the Copenhagen to its inertia, half falling the two steps back to Ivan. “Listen,” he said, hauling Ivan back up—his skin was cold—“listen. We are being chased by System ships. I need you to help me, okay?”
Ivan’s head was dipping. Mattie grabbed it, held him where they could see each other’s eyes.
“I need you to stay awake,” Mattie said. “I need you to put pressure on that leg, and I need you not to bleed out. Okay?”
There was a split in Ivan’s lip, a bruise darkening his cheek. Mattie shifted his grip so that his palm did not brush the shadowed edge of that mark.
Ivan said, “I’m going to pass out. You have me…I’m yours until I pass out. System ships?”
The ship rocked again, hard. Mattie caught himself before he could land on Ivan’s leg, took Ivan’s hand, and pressed a bunched-up corner of the blood-spattered blanket into his grip. “Press there,” he said. “I’ll handle the ships.”
Ivan said, “They don’t want us dead.”
“Ivan!”
“I know, not the Ananke,” Ivan said. “Those System ships attacking us. They won’t kill us—we have information that they want.”
BACKWARD
“We’ve done it,” Constance said in a voice Mattie had never heard from her, breathless with awe.
He sat in the Janus with Constance in low orbit over Earth. On the viewscreen, Mattie could see the blue and white shape of the Earth below. From up here, there were no waves on the ocean, nothing but the pure and perfect glistening sheen of mirror-smooth blue.
As he watched, black clouds billowed over that orb. Darkness was not a thing; it was an absence of light in the same way that cold was not a thing in and of itself, only an absence of heat. Yet the clouds that moved across the blue oceans seemed to be not clouds but shadows made solid, as if darkness had become a conscious thing and was slowly taking the Earth in its hands.
If the radio had still been on, Mattie and Constance would have heard the System crying out in shock, shouting in rage, silent in horror, shrill with desperate and disbelieving questions—some sort of reaction. Instead, the Janus was quiet, filled only by the sound of his and Constance’s breaths.
Mattie stared out the viewscreen at the fallen planet and waited for the roaring elation to hit him. This was it, he thought. This was the moment. Constance had done it, and he’d been at her side. The Earth was destroyed, the System dealt a crippling blow.
He waited.
“Take over the navigation.” Constance snapped out of her stillness, moving back toward the panel that controlled the Janus’s illegal weaponry. “We have to get out of here.”
There were still System ships in orbit around the Earth, Mattie knew. He reached for the navigation and woke the computer, turning the Janus around. In space around them, he knew, Constance’s allies were gathering to cover her and Mattie’s retreat to Mars.
Still, no roaring elation electrified his bones.
“We’ll dip into Venus’s orbit,” Constance said with a wild light in her eyes, firing another shot at a pursuing spacecraft. “Once we’re there, we’ll stop, and I’ll broadcast the news. Are the relays to the rest of the solar system set up?”
They had been set up for weeks. “Yes,” Mattie said.
“Good,” said Constance, and then, uncanny, she laughed, a wild and bloody Valkyrie laugh.
Mattie flew the Janus away from the ruined Earth and felt nothing at all.
FORWARD
The System ships had not lost interest in Mattie’s new, meaningless heading. Instead, they were starting to catch up.
Another bomb blasted alongside the Copenhagen, far enough away not to do damage, near enough to rattle Mattie. But all the bombs had been like that—aimed at the space around them, not directly at the Copenhagen. They had been shooting not to kill but to disable.
Mattie hated it when Ivan was right.
Behind him, Ivan laughed a strange, dry laugh. “Interrogation in war is so much different from interrogation in peace,” he said. “I don’t think she would have liked it. Barbaric.” He was silent for a blessed moment while Mattie checked the relativistic engines. Still too warm. He didn’t know if anything had been cracked in the stress of the disabling bomb, if there were any hairline fractures the Copenhagen’s computers couldn’t detect.
“Maybe she would have liked it,” Ivan mused.
“Hey!” Mattie said. “What do we do?”
“Try not to get captured.”
“That’s what I’m trying to fucking do already!” It wasn’t fair; Mattie knew it wasn’t. Ivan was half out of his head with pain and drugs and staying conscious only by adrenaline and will. But he would—should—know what to do. Ivan always did. Mattie just carried it out.
Ivan’s head was bent forward as if he were near to folding over. The hand holding the blanket had rallied itself and was pushing halfheartedly at his bleeding leg. “If we waited until they got close, we could take one out with us,” he said.
“What?” said Mattie, less because he had misheard, more because he wished he had.
Ivan said, “A self-destruct.”
BACKWARD
Mattie crouched down in an oddly shaped pocket in the wall of the Janus, breathing slowly to keep himself calm, watching Constance through the grate that separated his hiding place from the rest of the ship, and tried not to think of the Ananke.
Ivan had named the Janus back when Constance first had acquired the ship. He’d laughed his least pleasant laugh when he’d named it and had explained it to Mattie: Janus, the god of two faces. The Janus was outfitted like the smuggling ship it was: secret compartments had hidden supplies and bombs and now Mattie himself.
Ivan was still on the Ananke. Mattie tried not to think about that either. Once Earth was destroyed there would be no reason to hide and no reason to avoid the System and therefore no reason not to go find Ivan. He just had to hold on for a few more days, Mattie told himself, and then Constance would figure out how she and Mattie could save him.
Just visible through the crack in the wall where Mattie sat, Constance moved through her ship calmly, as if this trip were perfectly routine. Mattie could not see the viewscreen of the Janus, only the edges of the instrumentation panels on the tiny ship. But he knew when they approached Earth anyway, because the radio buzzed to life.
“Terran System defense to civilian ship Janus,” said the radio in an empty female voice. “You are approaching the Earth defensive zone. Divert your course or provide authorization.”
When Mattie saw Constance’s face through the bars of the grating as she made some small and precise diversion to the ship’s course, she did not look as if she had heard the radio at all.
“Terran defenses to civilian ship Janus, you are approaching a restricted zone. Cease your forward movement and wait for System police to reach you.”
The scrape and then the scream of metal against metal. Constance walked back into Mattie’s narrow frame of sight holding a hammer in one hand and dragging a chair behind her. It was not a heavy chair, and Mattie knew his foster sister was strong. She could have lifted the chair with one arm. Instead, she let it drag.
“Civilian ship Janus, this is the System. Respond.”
Constance pushed the chair against the wall and stepped up onto it. The black eye of a System camera stared down at her. Constance lifted the hammer, turned its claw against the wall, and pried out the camera in a screech of metal.
“Civilian ship Janus, cease your movement and surrender your vessel.”
The camera fell to the floor. Constance stepped off the chair and started to drag it behind her again.
Mattie pushed open the secret door and unfurled himself onto the floor of the piloting room. Constance pried the second camera out of the wall and let it drop to the floor.
The radio was still demanding their surrender. Mattie went over and considered it for a moment. All ships were built so that the System had the ability to connect remotely to their computers, allowing it to take control of rogue ships. Mattie had disabled most of those functions on the Janus immediately after Constance had purchased it. Right now, he suspected, the System was realizing that fact.
Under the same functions, any radio contact initiated by the System should be impossible to ignore or shut down. Mattie, with the first good cheer he’d felt in days, flicked the switch on the radio, and the System’s demands went abruptly silent.
There was another screech and thud. The third and final camera had been torn from the piloting room’s walls to topple onto the floor, upended, with wires sticking out like torn-up roots. Constance stepped down from the chair and walked over to where the camera had fallen, raised her booted foot, and stepped down on the fallen camera. The metal groaned; the glass shattered beneath her heel.
A fleeting sense of unease struck Mattie then, looking at Constance’s thinned lips, the tension between her brows as she crushed the camera. “Yeah, you’ve got no deep-seated issues at all.”
Constance gestured to another fallen camera on the floor, the one nearest Mattie, in wordless invitation. It was a round, solid, perfect shape, but the glass of it looked very fragile.
When he brought his foot down, it shattered very satisfyingly beneath his shoe.
Constance crushed the last camera and walked past Mattie to the instrumentation panels. Mattie felt something nudge the sole of his foot and looked at the bottom of his boot to find that shattered bits of glass and brittle metal had embedded themselves in the sole. He carefully pulled the largest of the slivers out.
“System ships are coming,” Constance remarked, and Mattie lifted his head from his boot. On the screen, a hundred red dots were flying toward the gleaming white light that indicated the Janus’s current position.
The Janus was not alone, of course. Fifty other ships flown by Constance’s people had converged on Earth at the same time. They would distract the System, spread out its defensive reaction, and buy Mattie and Constance a little time. One of those ships, Mattie knew, had Ivan’s mother on board.
“Are we in range?” Constance asked, and Mattie switched the view on the front screen to video.
The System ships were too small to be seen in this view except as tiny sparks moving against the stars. But bright and gleaming blue, filling up the center of the screen, was the Earth. They were close enough now that the moon’s orbit took it to the very far edge of the screen; Mattie could just pick out the curls of white clouds in the Terran atmosphere.
“Yeah,” he said, and sat down and delved into the computer.
The System ships were coming toward them, but Mattie left them to Constance. She darted the ship away from those ships but did not move away from the Earth. The Janus was too close to the Earth and the moon and in a highly trafficked area; the System ships wouldn’t fire until they were very close. Constance and Mattie had some time, but Mattie didn’t want to have to work in a ship that was actively in a firefight. The System’s attacks would only increase in intensity once they realized that Constance’s ship was outfitted with illegal weaponry.
He’d been afraid, a part of him, that something might have happened to the bombs that had been planted on the surface of the planet in the intervening time since he and Ivan had gone to the moon to make sure that everything was in place. He’d been afraid that something might go wrong, even more afraid once Ivan wasn’t there to be afraid on his behalf. But he found the bombs in a few short keystrokes, ready and waiting.
Constance was busy dodging the System’s attacks. It was Mattie who would have to detonate Constance’s bombs.
Ivan hadn’t wanted them to do this, Mattie knew. Ivan had been bent on persuading Constance to turn aside from this moment. And Ivan would have been horrified to see that in the end it was not Constance’s finger on the trigger, but Mattie’s.
Constance said, “Mattie, do it.”
Ivan wasn’t there. Mattie detonated the bombs.
FORWARD
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Mattie asked.
Ivan made a thoughtful noise.
“We’re not going to blow ourselves up!”
Another bomb went off and rocked the Copenhagen sideways. Mattie caught himself on the wall and hauled himself back into the pilot’s chair. Ivan said, “Not if they do it first.”
“You don’t get to be drugged and have a shitty sense of humor,” Mattie snarled.
Ivan smiled at him through split and bloodless lips.
“The Copenhagen has no self-destruct,” Mattie said, and turned back to the computer displays, racking his brain for some other way out of this.
“Good. If it did, the computer would know about it and she could read it right off.”
Mattie’s fingers tightened around the edge of the control panel. “The Ananke isn’t following us, Iv—”
“You have weapons,” Ivan said.
“None powerful enough to put a dent in those ships. And I’m short a gunner.”
“Inside the ship,” Ivan clarified. “You’re the brother of the Mallt-y-Nos. You must have bombs on board.”
“Great,” Mattie said. “So that’s your great plan. I pull the trigger on a bomb and kill us both. Is that really what you want?”
“No.”
“You don’t want to get yourself blown up?” Mattie asked, and for an instant he understood how Constance could blaze with rage, how it could not matter to her who she hurt or what she did in her anger. “No?”
But Ivan didn’t answer.
“No?” Mattie demanded again furiously, and twisted around to see that Ivan’s hand had fallen from his thigh and he was staring down at the blood in his lap with peculiar blankness.
“Ivan?” said Mattie. “Ivan?”
He did not answer.
The System ships were coming closer. They would disable the Copenhagen, Mattie realized, and take them both captive.
The relativistic engines could be broken already, or trying to use them could destroy them beyond repair and trap both Mattie and Ivan in the middle of nowhere until they starved.
Mattie turned the relativistic engines back on, gave them full power, and ran.
BACKWARD
The first time Mattie escaped from the Ananke, he left on his sister’s ship.
He realized quickly after Milla Ivanov had been brought on board the Ananke that Constance must be next, and the thought relieved him. Ivan’s mother, Milla, was an unknown quantity, but Con was Mattie’s sister and Ivan’s…friend, and she’d brought dogs with her, which meant that she had a plan for getting him and Ivan out. They were badly in need of a plan.
His first impulse when he realized Constance was landing in the docking bay was to go straight for Ivan and get him out of that white room and away from that bitch interrogator immediately. But Ivan had warned him against a rescue attempt while he was under guard, because Mattie was outnumbered and injured: Domitian had broken Mattie’s arm when Mattie had come on board the ship. But now Constance was here. Mattie would rendezvous with Connie, and she would tell him what to do.
It took a little bit of help from Milla Ivanov to get into the Janus unseen, but he managed it, slipping into Constance’s ship right behind the backs of the Ananke’s crew. He was grinning when he burst in from adrenaline and the joy of the con. Then the dogs lifted their twin black heads from the floor, quizzical, and he stopped short.
“There, doggie,” he said. One black Lab wagged its tail uncertainly, beating against the floor, but the other rose to its feet from where it had been lying on a blanket on the floor and advanced toward him, starting to bark, low and deep and dangerous.
Before Mattie could do anything Constance appeared at the door and said, breathless, “Sit!”
The dogs continued to bark. “Constance—” Mattie whispered.
“Still!” Constance snapped with a look that meant the order applied to him as well, and she grabbed a bag from beneath the Janus’s central panel. There was a syringe inside. She grabbed the dog nearest her and stuck the syringe into its flank. It whined and twisted around, teeth digging into the skin that had been punctured.
Constance straightened up. “Stay,” she said to Mattie, to the dogs, and left, locking the door behind her.
Mattie went to the computer and quickly deleted the last few minutes of surveillance from the camera in Constance’s ship, shutting it down and then adding a few more errors to her system for good measure; when the System found that the footage was missing, Constance could explain that contact with the Ananke had contaminated her computer as well. When he was done, he sat down where he had been before, out of view of the door and across from the black dogs.
He wondered what Constance’s plan might be. She would have one: Constance always knew what to do.
Not long after Mattie had sat down, the dog that Constance had stuck with the syringe began to move oddly, its hindquarters shivering, whimpering low in its throat. It stood up jerkily and tried to move away from where Constance had stung it but stopped a few paces away and stood very still.
The other dog followed, its tail low but wagging uncertainly, sniffing the injured dog carefully before whuffing out the air and shaking its head. The injured dog walked back to the blanket they shared—limping now—and lay down slowly, its wounded leg twitching. Mattie watched the ribs moving beneath the satiny black fur slow down, grow shallow, and finally, at last, stop.
The living dog whined. Its first bark rang out unexpectedly through the cabin and made Mattie flinch. Better a dog than he or Ivan, but there was something unpleasant about that wild, inconsolable howling.
A key turned in the door. Constance entered, and the dog started barking at her.
“Quiet,” said Constance, and closed the door again, locking it. She went straight for the pilot’s chair.
“What…” Mattie began, and Constance said sharply, “Shh!”
She activated the ship’s launch sequence. There were fine tremors in her hands.
The Janus lifted off and rose up and out of the Ananke. Constance bent over the ship’s controls as if she felt that if she leaned far enough forward, the ship might travel faster. Mattie had thought that he’d seen something almost like fear in her eyes when she first had come back on board the Janus, but looking at her face now, he saw nothing of the kind. It was fury that pulled taut all the muscles on her face, a burning, hating fury.
Mattie said, “How are we going to get him back?”
The surviving dog had lain down beside its dead partner, resting its head on the dead dog’s still shoulders.
Constance said, “We aren’t.”
FORWARD
The Copenhagen’s engines did not give out. Mattie waited until the System ships had vanished entirely from their instruments before he let their speed drop again, allowing the engines to fall into a safer output range. Then he changed their course so that they were headed once more to Callisto. At a moderate speed, they would make it there in time for the rendezvous.
He would have to examine the engines for damage, and soon. But for the moment he had greater concerns.
Ivan had, true to his warning, passed out. Mattie wasn’t certain what had done it: the end of adrenaline from keeping himself alive on the Ananke, the cumulative effects of blood loss and injury, the poisons in his bloodstream coming due. His skin was cool when Mattie touched him, and he did not respond to his name.
In a way, it was a mercy he was so deeply unconscious. Mattie set to cleaning and bandaging the wound in his leg. When he went to find the pulse, he found bruises on Ivan’s neck: small, spaced a finger’s width apart.
Ivan might sleep for a while yet. Ivan might never again wake up. Mattie dragged himself away from Ivan eventually to sit in the piloting platform’s one chair and stare out at the stars through the viewscreen.
The System ships were gone. The Ananke was gone. Mattie and Ivan were far out between planets, where no one, not System or rebel, would bother to venture. They were as alone as they could be in the solar system at the moment and as safe as they could be in their isolation. If Mattie wanted to make the rendezvous Constance had planned at Callisto, he simply would have to maintain their course, and they would arrive at Jupiter’s moon in due time. He simply had to maintain their course.
Behind him, Ivan was still and silent.
Mattie changed their course.