FORWARD

Ivan was in the white room again, and Ida was watching him from across that gleaming steel table.

No, Ivan thought for a lucid moment, I’m not here, Mattie got me out, but Ida was watching him and he couldn’t relax his guard for a second, not around her. There was a chill in the white room, as there always had been, a cold that stole his stillness in shivering; it seemed even colder now. He smiled at Ida, thick with charm, and she smiled back, and showed her tombstone teeth.

“When you know someone completely,” Ida said, “they have a kind of life in you.”

Ivan said nothing. Sometimes that was the best course to take. She stood and smoothed out her skirt and blouse, as slender and sleek as a sheathed blade.

“An animal that knows its hunter completely can predict it,” Ida said, and began to pace. The sound of her heels was the Russian roulette click of a revolver on an empty chamber. “The prey that knows its predator survives.”

She smiled at him again. Her lips were crimson against her teeth. When she moved, the cold moved with her as if she were an inverse star that did not emit heat but absorbed it, a black hole that sucked the warmth and life from the room.

“Of course,” she said, laughing, “the predator that knows its prey never goes hungry, either.”

Ivan had a sudden flash of her, thrashing, the weight of her in his lap struggling, her black eyes going empty. Her eyes now had that same incognizant darkness.

He said, “It’s petty of you to haunt me.”

“People are petty,” Ida said.

A chill struck him. It seemed to come from inside himself, like if he cut himself open, he would find the same darkness that lit Ida’s eyes.

“The moment of death is the most intimate moment of anyone’s life,” Ida said. She had something in her mind; Ivan could hear it in her voice, the way she was setting him up for a fall. A dizzy spell struck him, but he fought it off. He couldn’t show weakness, not here with her. He had to stay in control.

“To witness it—” Ida said. “To cause it—”

A flash of something, the colors in his sight turning inverse; Ivan knew for a moment that he was on the verge of passing out, but he didn’t. The white room was lit oddly by a light from behind him, and Ida still was pacing but no longer speaking, her dark gaze fixed on him and showing a predator’s hungry heart.

Ivan turned as much as he could, chained to his chair, and then found that he could stand even though the cuffs remained frigid around his wrists.

The light was coming from far off in a black nothing like the fabric of space. It was brilliant, blazing, a fire that burned without sound in the emptiness of vacuum. Ivan was too far off to feel its heat, but if he looked closely, he could see what it was.

Constance Harper was in the inferno, or Constance Harper was the inferno. She blazed with it, her bare skin unburned by the flames.

Constance, he tried to say, but no sound escaped from his mouth, Constance, and walked toward her, but now that he had come close enough to see that it was she standing in the flames, he could come no closer. He was moving and she was not moving, but somehow with every step he took she remained the same distance away.

From behind him he still heard those steps, that click-click of heels, that Russian roulette sound. He did not turn to face it but reached toward Constance, burning, sightless. Constance, Constance, Ivan said to try to make her see him, to try to make her hear him, but with no result. How could she see him with all that light in her eyes?

Constance, he said, Constance, as the flames spread over her skin, but she did not hear him, and he was so cold, he was freezing down to his core, and the chill of the white room had its hand stretched out over his shoulder—

Ivan woke.

For a moment he simply lay and breathed, keeping his respiration steady. He did not know where he was. There was a steady click-click-click from some machinery that struck his mind awry. It seemed to have come with him out of his dream. He shook the unease away. The sound was harmless.

Other than that sound, the space he was in was quiet; he lay on something firm, something covered him to his chest, there was an ache and burn in his leg that was growing in intensity. And underneath it all someone else was breathing. Ivan found that his breath had automatically synced to match that respiration, and when he listened to that steady sound, the last pieces came together in his mind.

He opened his eyes. Above him was the gray paneled ceiling of the Copenhagen, a familiar sight, though he could hardly remember looking at it. The last thing he recalled with perfect clarity was Althea Bastet lowering her gun and asking him plaintively, “What do I do now?”

Ivan lifted his head and found the piloting platform, the space ahead of them spotted with distant stars. Mattie was sitting there in the near dark, his back to Ivan. “Mattie.”

Mattie turned, his eyes wide and dark in the dimness of the cabin. And then Mattie was pushing back his chair and striding over, moving so fast that Ivan had hardly adjusted to the movement before Mattie was crouched down at his side. “Hey,” Mattie said.

“Hey.” Ivan deliberately untensed all the muscles that had gathered themselves for flight the moment Mattie had moved so suddenly.

“Do you remember where you are?”

Not the Ananke, Ivan would have said, but held his tongue. Somehow speaking the name of the Ananke seemed dangerous, like whispering the name of a bloody queen into a darkened mirror.

“I’m on the Copenhagen.” Ivan chose his words with care and his enunciation with precision. He studied the sealed cabinets that lined the walls. This ship was small: one room for living accommodations and instrumentation. He knew somehow, without remembering having seen it, that there was a bathroom and a storage room beyond the wall behind his head.

Mattie’s hand was heavy on his chest. “What do you remember?”

Constance burning, the click of heels on a metal floor, a living ship blazing with light. System ships coming after them and a self-destruct, but perhaps that had been a dream. “Not much,” Ivan said. “How long was I out?”

“Ivan,” Mattie said with a strain in his voice that made Ivan reevaluate exactly how much stress he had been under for the past however many days, “answer my question.”

“I remember the Ananke,” said Ivan. “I remember going on board; I remember getting captured. I was interrogated. Constance blew up Earth. You came back. Althea let us go. We are traveling toward Callisto. There were System ships.” He checked Mattie’s expression to be sure that statement was accurate. It seemed to be, so Ivan added firmly, “My memory is fine, Mattie. How long have I been out? Where are we?”

“How does your leg feel?”

“I remember getting shot.”

“I didn’t ask if you remembered; I asked how it felt.”

His leg was burning, but it was not the terrible wrongness of a sickening wound. “Better than it did,” Ivan said, and remembered something else from the Ananke. “How’s your arm?”

“It’s fine. Constance got me to a System medical chamber, fixed the break in a few minutes.” Mattie hesitated. “I couldn’t take you to one for your leg, because…”

“Because there weren’t any you could take me to.” Ivan’s thoughts were settling into an order again, organizing themselves, organizing him. Constance had blown up Earth and begun her revolution; that meant the solar system was in civil war. There wouldn’t be any hospital Mattie could safely take Ivan to, not now. “Help me sit up.”

Mattie got an arm under his back and helped pull Ivan up until he could lean against the wall. The change in position made Ivan briefly dizzy, but when it passed, he felt more awake than he had for days. His gaze swept automatically over the Copenhagen again, looking for danger or weakness. There were no cameras, of course. The room was cleaner than Ivan was used to seeing in a room maintained by one Matthew Gale.

Mattie sat against the wall next to him, on the floor beside the mattress, his shoulder leaning into Ivan’s arm. He said, “You were pretty out of it for a while.”

A thought struck him. “Mattie.”

“I read something about the truth drugs you were on, something about some psychological effects, flashback hallucinations, which—”

“Mattie, how long was I out?”

“A little over a week.”

“When is the rendezvous with Constance?”

Mattie spoke flatly, as if by doing so he could escape further discussion. “The rendezvous was two days ago.”

“Two days?”

Mattie rose to his feet, evading again, but there was nowhere to run to in the smallness of the Copenhagen’s cabin. Ivan realized, “You missed it on purpose.”

“You should lie down. You just woke up.”

“I’ll lie down when we’re done talking. Why did we miss the rendezvous?”

“You’re un-fucking-believable,” Mattie said. Sometimes when he said that, it was a compliment. Ivan did not think it was in this case. “I don’t want to play this stupid game,” he said, and crouched down very suddenly, right in front of Ivan again. As he looked at the tension that held Mattie’s face, something struck Ivan’s hollow heart, and the reverb of it nearly weakened him into backing down. “I want you to lie down and get some rest, and when you’re better, we’ll figure something out.”

“I’m not going to rest if I’m sitting here wondering what happened. We missed the rendezvous. Why?”

“Does it matter?” Mattie snapped.

“How are we going to find her? Does she know I’m alive? Does she even know you’re alive?”

“I don’t know what she knows.”

“We can still go to Callisto,” Ivan said. “Anji will be there.”

“I don’t know.”

“That was the plan. Has the plan changed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anji will be by Jupiter,” Ivan insisted. His head was pounding, but he felt the better for having a clear plan of action to throw himself toward. “How far are we from Jupiter?”

“Ivan—” Mattie began.

Ivan cut him off before he could get too far into convincing himself not to go. “Mattie,” he said. “Please.”

Mattie stared back at him. For a moment, the twist of his mouth turned bitter, and then he stood up and took his expression out of Ivan’s sight. He walked back over to the piloting terminal and began to put some coordinates into the machine. Ivan watched him and tried to breathe evenly, but an unsteady pull had come to his lungs, a lower drag to his heavy skull.

Mattie said, “We’re on course for Callisto.”

“Thank you,” Ivan said, and meant it. He leaned back against the wall but did not lie down and did not sleep. He was watching the stars to see if the Copenhagen really did change its course.

The stars shifted. They were back on course. Ivan let his eyes slip shut.

BACKWARD

When Ivan was nine Terran years of age, back when he was called Leon, his mother took him to see Saturn.

“That’s Rhea, do you see?” Milla said in her steady voice, quietly enough to be addressing him but clearly enough that the System administrators and the cameras overhead could capture every word. An actress couldn’t project as precisely as she could. Ivan stood at her side and kept himself as carefully still and controlled as she did beside him.

They stood before a huge window, floor to ceiling, that showed the Saturnian system in all its sepulchral silence. Ivan stared out at the golden planet, at the slicing rings.

His mother’s hand landed on his elbow, fingers curling around under his arm, hidden beneath his shirt.

“Do you see it, there?” she asked, and stretched out her free arm to point, like a statue of Diana drawing her bow. Her fingertip landed on the glass just above a spot of moving light.

Under Ivan’s arm, her fingers began to tap out a message in gentle pressure and release against his skin. You can show a little fear, his mother said.

He glanced up at her quickly, but she was of course not looking at him. Show a little fear, he thought, and tried to remember what expressions that would entail.

“I see it,” he told his mother, and she let her finger drift, following Rhea’s slow orbit.

“Your father took me there once.” Her voice was colored palely with regret, like paint off a brush dipped into water. Her fingers pressed into his arm again. Play the crowd, she warned him. Make them think you’re innocent, not that you’re very good at hiding.

Ivan said, “Did you and my father meet there?”

“No.” Milla let her hand fall back to her side. “We met on Titan.” She shifted, tucking Ivan’s arm more securely into her own, her fingers entwining with his, the better to pass on quiet messages. Ivan let the childish contact happen, because he knew the System was watching, and they were waiting for a reason to kill him.

“I believe we’ll get to see Titan,” said Milla, seemingly to him, but Ivan had grown attuned to the subtle shifts of her voice over the course of surviving his early youth and so he was not surprised when the ship’s captain answered from behind him: “We will, Doctor Ivanov.”

“Thank you.” Milla continued to gaze out at the planet ahead. Ivan stood very still at her side, trapped in some prey instinct that warned him not to call attention to himself.

His mother’s fingers pressed a secret message against his hand. I met your father on Titan on a trip for university there he was standing in the square talking about freedom and I was Terran then so I argued with him but when the System police came to stop him talking I helped him get away.

The spaceship was drawing near to a filmy orange moon while Milla tapped out her truth to Ivan.

“That’s Titan,” said Milla, as calm as her secret message had not been. Titan’s atmosphere was thick and opaque: a rare moon to hold an atmosphere. The clouds shuddered and flashed with hidden storms.

“Your father’s reign of terror ended there.” Milla tapped out against his hand, I loved him.

She paused, the stillness of her fingers against Ivan’s hand as pronounced a silence as the rushing in his ears.

I should have hidden it better.

The ship was leaving Titan behind and traveling toward the planet itself, toward those slicing rings.

Don’t let the System see your heart, she warned him. Don’t let yourself know that it is there.

Aloud she said, “After your father, the System knew that Saturn wasn’t safe. But they left a monument in the rings so that all would remember what happens to those who threaten the people of the System.”

She spoke as if reading from a script. Against his hand she said, Your father lost because I wasn’t there to help him control the situation.

His mother hadn’t been with his father then, Ivan knew, because she had been on Earth to give birth to Ivan.

The ship was moving rapidly; the rings were growing in size, no longer looking razor-edged and colorful but beginning to appear as they were: widely spaced rocks all in the same orbit together. There was nothing to see yet, but Ivan could feel that his mother was tense.

You and I survive because we have control of our situation.

The System ship took them past the sparse rocks of Saturn’s F ring, disrupting their orbits as they passed. Ivan knew that their ship would leave a distinct ripple in the clean-cut shape of Saturn’s rings.

“It was illegal once to travel through the rings,” his mother said serenely while tapping out, Never lose control of your situation, of yourself, or of the people around you.

The dusty Roche Division opened up ahead of them, and the ship powered through, heading straight for the crisp shine of the A ring ahead.

“It took special dispensation from the System for us to travel here to see them.”

Everyone is controllable. Never get yourself in a situation where you can’t control—

But Ivan lost track of her message because ahead of him he saw what he had been brought there to see.

The A ring was very narrow, only about fifteen meters thick, much narrower, in fact, than the ship that Ivan even now was flying in. It was full of stones that ranged in size from dust to boulders that Ivan would have considered hardly midsize on Earth.

And between the stones, there were bodies. Ivan took in a breath.

His mother’s fingers tightened on his. At first he thought it was another message, but he realized after a moment of stillness that she had nothing to say.

Less than a decade old: a short time cosmically, but eternity to him. He’d had for himself the nine years of life denied to the people he saw now, floating between stones with their eyes staring, their limbs torn, exsanguinated, the blood all evaporated by vacuum and heat, mummified by the distant sun.

And his mother leaned forward at some signal from the System that Ivan did not see and pointed to the nearest corpse, a young man whose skin had been slowly blackened and crisped by the sun’s radiation.

“Do you see?” Milla asked with calm cruelty and the weight of the System’s attention resting heavily on their backs.

FORWARD

The Copenhagen was a fast little ship. It was not long before their changed course took them within sight of Jupiter. Ivan was standing up by then, leaning on the wall. Mattie had helped him up but flatly refused to be an accessory to further movement. Ivan suspected that he intended to wait for him to give up and sit back down, but Ivan remained standing.

“How close?” Ivan asked. He asked not just because he could not quite see the details on the viewscreen from where he stood but because he did not think Mattie was paying much attention: Mattie had his chair halfway turned so that he could keep a wary eye on Ivan, and between Ivan and the viewscreen, Ivan seemed to be receiving the greater share of his attention.

Mattie glanced over at the screen.

“Not in the Hill sphere yet,” he said. “But it’s visible now.” A few deft movements of his hand brought the screen into closer focus; Jupiter jumped into view, striated, with sparks of the Galilean moons darting around it.

In the brief moment when Mattie’s attention was taken from him, Ivan let himself shift, keeping his breathing quiet, to ease the pressure on his burning leg.

“I’m slowing down for the approach,” Mattie said. “How’s your leg?”

“Fine.”

“Yeah.” Mattie was looking at Ivan’s leg, not at Ivan himself. Although Ivan no longer was wearing the bloodstained white scrubs he had been shot in, Mattie seemed to know precisely where to look. “If we had a System medical chamber, it’d be better by now. No scar.”

“It’s starting to close on its own. It’ll be fine.” He wasn’t certain he’d trust a medical chamber in any case. A machine couldn’t be reasoned with or persuaded.

“Good thing that bitch was a bad shot.”

“Or a very good one,” Ivan said. It would have been infinitely easier to aim for his torso and leave his internal organs lacerated beyond repair, but Althea Bastet had fired low and to the side, the blow a glancing one.

“You don’t hate her.”

“Who?”

“Althea.” The word came from Mattie’s mouth strangely laden, as if he had simply mispronounced the words “that bitch” and come up with Althea’s true name by accident of vowels.

“No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“She wasn’t a bad person.”

“What’s that word,” Mattie asked, “the one for when you like the person who hurts you?”

“Masochism?”

“No, I mean the one where you like your kidnapper.”

“It’s ‘Shut up, Matthew,’ ” Ivan said.

“Stockholm syndrome,” said Mattie. “That’s it. I just think it’s good for us to have a word for it, you know? So we can really communicate.”

“It’s hard to hate someone if you understand why they’ve done the things they did.”

“Is it?” Mattie asked in a steely tone that Ivan had never heard him use before. “I don’t think so.”

The computer beeped. Mattie turned to see why, and Ivan held his breath. An alarm would be louder, surely, if they were under attack or a System ship had come near.

“We’re in the Hill sphere,” Mattie reported.

“How long until Callisto?”

“Direct route, a half an hour. Long route—”

“Direct route,” Ivan said.

“We don’t want to fly straight at it,” Mattie said. “We don’t know what’s going on in there.”

“So run a scan. Check the radio.”

“I am running scans, and I’ve opened the Copenhagen to transmissions,” Mattie said patiently.

“Don’t just open for transmissions; turn on the radio for any broadcasts at all,” Ivan said, and Mattie reached over to the radio and flicked it on. A dreadful roar of white noise burst from the throat of the machine. Mattie cocked a brow at Ivan as if to say, Happy now? But he did turn the radio down and set it to scan between frequencies for any real transmissions.

“I’m going in obliquely,” he said, and that was that.

The Copenhagen skirted Jupiter, keeping to the vast regions of space unpopulated by the moons or thin, vacuous rings. Ivan leaned back against the wall and ignored the way the burning in his leg grew worse with every second.

The static of the radio flickered off and on at even intervals as the radio automatically jumped between frequencies. It was hypnotic, like the way the clouds on Jupiter’s vast bulk spiraled and moved almost too slowly to be seen.

Mattie said, “You haven’t asked me about your mother.”

His back was to Ivan; he was focused on the screen, on flying the ship. His question had no origin that Ivan could find. Not understanding why a question was being asked had always made Ivan uneasy: he couldn’t tell what Mattie might want to hear.

“No,” Ivan said. “I haven’t.”

Mattie asked him nothing else.

They took a long spiraling loop into the Jovian system, the best way to see anything that might be there. They had gone nearly all the way around the planet, and the ache from Ivan’s leg had spread up into his torso nearly all the way to his head when he realized that there was something strange about all that static.

“What frequency are we on?” Ivan’s voice sounded distant even to himself. Sometimes he felt that way, as if his skin were not his own, as if his voice were someone else speaking, as if the real he were somewhere locked up inside his head.

“Uh, we’re a couple of channels above System Standard Frequency 25.”

“And we’re going through channels with increasing frequency?”

“Yeah.” Mattie was leaning over the controls, clearly more intent on navigating through the Jovian system unseen than listening to the radio.

Ivan said, “These are the short-range frequencies.”

“So?”

Another click; the radio blasted static from a new channel into the cabin of the Copenhagen like a polar wind. “We should be hearing transmissions from the moons.”

“There’s a war going on; they’re probably blacked out.”

There still should have been something, Ivan thought, a few rebel bursts of communication. Or, more likely, if the war was actively going on, there should have been communication between ships, between armies.

He said, “Have you seen any ships so far?”

“We’re not that close to Jupiter. They might be farther in.”

The radio looped back around to the lowest frequencies and began to step through them again. There was a different quality to the static at different wavelengths; Ivan could hear it. Low, down here, the basso hum of Jupiter could be heard, pierced through by the whizzing of its moons, like clouds passing over the sun. The static at all frequencies was the singing of the stars.

They were drawing, at last, near to Callisto. Ivan leaned more heavily on the wall and watched it grow. He could see its star-pocked surface against the vast looming bulk of Jupiter.

But there was something off about Callisto’s gleaming shape. The sunlight was sparking off points around the moon. The static switched again on the radio, shivering. Ivan found himself leaving the wall and limping toward the piloting platform, his gaze fixed on the glints of light that surrounded Callisto.

The static had filled the cabin to such an extent that it had filled his leg; there was no longer any burning pain, only a dull and buzzing numbness.

Mattie finally looked up when he heard him move. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Mattie.” Ivan reached out and gripped the back of Mattie’s chair across the platform but did not have the strength to pull himself up beside it. “Callisto doesn’t have any rings,” but there he was, looking at Callisto, and there was a thin low ring encircling it.

Mattie looked and swore, his voice low and punching. He reached for the controls.

“No,” Ivan said, “get closer.”

Before Ivan’s eyes, the unnatural rings grew larger, more clear. He could see the bits of debris that constituted them. There was a partial hull of a ship; there was a girder that could only have been human-made. He saw flecks of steel and carbon, and that was only what was large enough to see. The radio clicked between stations beside him, a low roar of snowy static. He had seen the rings of Saturn once, and now, here, he knew, knew, that if they got close enough he would see the same thing. But what bodies would he see here? Constance, bloody, eyes staring? His mother with half her skin blackened? Anji or Christoph or Julian—

“Ivan!” In a moment Mattie’s face had replaced the gleaming image of the slowly approaching moon.

“That’s where the fleets are,” Ivan said. “That’s why we haven’t heard anything on the radio.”

“There’re not enough ships there to be a full fleet,” Mattie said slowly and clearly. “Not enough to be the System fleet. Not enough to be Constance’s fleet, or Anji’s, or Christoph’s.”

Ivan forced himself to look at the debris, how spread out it was, how low to the moon. “If there’s a ring like that on all the other moons—”

“There isn’t,” said Mattie, as if by conviction alone he could make truth.

The static-skipping radio suddenly beeped, a rapid pattern of tones. “Code,” Ivan said, but Mattie already was moving, tapping in a directive to the computer, trying to recover the wavelength they had just lost.

An ache was traveling up Ivan’s arms; he looked down to see that he had his hands clenched so tightly into fists that the skin of his knuckles had gone bloodless.

Static, static, static, nothing. “It was just—”

“I know,” Mattie snapped, and iterated the radio again, stepping it from frequency to frequency. Ivan listened to the staccato bursts of static. This was where the signal had been before, he was sure—

The radio beeped again, an arrhythmic pattern that set Ivan’s heart to beating once more. This time Mattie was ready and stopped them on the station immediately, listening to the rhythm.

“Do you know what they’re saying?”

Ivan was counting intervals, matching them to the codes he’d had memorized since he was a child. “No. It’s definitely code, but I don’t know the key.”

“Can you crack it?” Mattie asked just as the signal vanished.

“If you can find it.”

Mattie already was searching. He looked like a hunting dog bent over the computer like that, all sharp and focused attention. A strange throb of affection for him struck Ivan’s heart then, entirely inappropriate to their situation; he pushed it aside.

“They’re changing stations,” Mattie said a moment later, after he’d found the beeping once more.

“Can you tell the pattern?”

“Not with only three frequencies. They’re sticking to short-range, though.”

Then the broadcast was from nearby. “This is some variant on my mother’s code.”

“You think it’s Anji?”

“Who else could it be?” Ivan asked. His fists were still so tightly clenched that his forearms ached, but when he looked away from the radio, trying to center himself, he only saw the bodies outside Callisto once more. “Broadcast the hounds signal.”

“We don’t know who else is out there.”

“These are revolutionaries. We haven’t heard any other broadcasts in this system.”

“Ivan.” Mattie was a tense curve over the computer, turned toward him but not meeting his eyes. “If the System—”

“You are the brother of the Mallt-y-Nos. If the System attacks us, the revolutionaries will fall over themselves to save your life.”

Something bitter bent the bowed curve of Mattie’s mouth, and then he was stabbing a message into the computer, and the barking and howling of the Cŵn Annwn roared out into the stars on all frequencies, overwhelming the tense and unsteady beat of the revolutionary communication.

When the howling had finished, the radio went back to iterating through stations. Nothing showed but static.

“Did they hear?” Ivan wondered.

“I don’t know how they fucking couldn’t have.” Mattie stood in agitation, moving restlessly, as if he would like to pace but didn’t want to move too far from the ship’s controls.

Ivan said, “We should broadcast again.”

“What, and get every System ship in an AU of Jupiter headed toward us?” Mattie made a sharp, agitated slash of the air with his hand, then changed the exterior camera view on the viewscreen, turning their sight out toward the open universe and away from the corpses on Callisto.

Ivan seated himself in the abandoned piloting chair. The cramped muscles in his leg throbbed and spasmed with the movement, but there was no dampness on the bandage. He bent over the computer.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m checking the instruments,” Ivan said.

“Just stay away from Callisto.”

“I have no intention of—Mattie.”

Mattie was at his side faster than a breath, leaning over the chair, leaning over Ivan. Ivan knew when he had seen what Ivan had, because his agitated fidgeting stopped, settling down into that focused attention once more.

Far off, half hidden by the planet’s wispy rings, were spots of warmth that did not move with the rest of the stars.

“They were orbiting one of the other moons,” Mattie guessed.

The little sparks of light were coming toward them slowly, steadily, and in chill silence. Why had they not responded?

“There’s more,” said Mattie, and Ivan saw that there were other ships, too: small, hidden among the moons and the thin rings, but now leaving their moons behind and coming toward the Copenhagen.

“Hail them,” Ivan suggested, and Mattie bent over him to reach for the comm—it was better to have Mattie make first contact in situations like this; his accent was much less alarming to a nervous revolutionary than Ivan’s was—and open a broadcast again.

“This is the rebel ship Copenhagen,” Mattie said. “We’ve come on behalf of the Mallt-y-Nos.”

No response. A few of the nearer ships were close enough now to run a scan on them: attack ships, all four of them. More heavily armed than the Copenhagen.

Mattie got back on the radio. “This is the rebel ship Copenhagen. We’ve come as friends. We’re looking for the Mallt-y-Nos.”

The four foremost ships were not just near enough to be scanned; they were near enough for the Copenhagen’s sensors to detect an increase in radiation in a specific place on their layout and to draw the logical conclusion.

“Their weaponry systems just came online,” Ivan said.

“They’re System?”

“Two of them are System ships but modded. The other two are civilian ships even more heavily modified. System doesn’t mod its own ships.”

“Maybe it fucking does now!” Mattie bent over Ivan again, this time going for the piloting controls. “There are more of them coming from the moons. We’re getting out of here.”

“If we run, they fire,” Ivan pointed out.

“So we outrun their bombs.”

“Maybe we can outrun some of their bombs. But we can’t outrun that third ship, the small one. Do you see—”

“We’re not going to just sit here and—”

“Signal them again,” Ivan said.

“What good did that do?” Mattie said, and reached for the flight controls. Ivan grabbed his wrist before he could. Ahead of them, the radiation signature that indicated a live weaponry system brightened: a sure sign of the ships’ bombs being armed. Around the distant moons, more and more ships were rising, engines bright.

They had stumbled into a hornet’s nest and woken the wasps. Ivan said, “Hail them again.”

Mattie swore at him. Ivan hardly heard him, staring at the brightness of their oncoming destruction, and Mattie pulled free of Ivan’s grasp and went to the radio again, shouting into it, “This is the rebel ship Copenhagen. This is a rebel ship!”

The ships’ brightness was reaching peak. At any moment, Ivan knew—and the Copenhagen’s sensors warned—those ships would fire. The Copenhagen would be hit, and the gravity of Callisto would pull them in. Ivan would be another blackened body in that graveyard ring.

“This is the brother of the Mallt-y-Nos, Matthew Gale! I am on this ship with Leontios Ivanov, the son of Milla and Connor Ivanov! This is Mattie and Ivan! Do not fire!”

And then—unbelievably—the brightness of those stars began to dim. Mattie sucked in a ragged breath, and Ivan found himself moving without forethought: reaching up to Mattie’s arm that crossed over his chest in order to reach the communications panel, closing his fingers around the warmth of that arm, crushing the fabric of his shirt against the space over his heart.

The communications panel chimed: someone wanted to speak to them. Mattie moved to open the connection, and even that slight motion unhooked Ivan’s fingers from his arm.

The view of great Jupiter and the lights of the rising ships vanished, replaced by a video feed from one of the other ships. For a moment, nothing but black as the Copenhagen negotiated with the other computer for video access, and then a familiar woman’s face was staring out at them, black buzz starting to grow out on her shaven head and her dark eyes wide.

“Anji,” said Mattie, and she reacted to her name like a physical touch, a flinch passing over her features. The jewels in her ear winked.

“Hello, boys,” Anji said, and then, “You may have just accidentally started another war.”

BACKWARD

“She’s late,” Ivan said.

“She’ll be here,” Mattie said. “She always is.”

Ivan didn’t particularly share his confidence. They’d been waiting at the Martian black market for almost an hour, longer than Ivan liked to stay at such places. He couldn’t shake the constant paranoia that at any moment the System would come down on them like lightning.

But this was where the rendezvous had been set up, and if they missed this one, it might be months before they could arrange another.

And Ivan had to see Constance.

A steady wind went through the makeshift kiosks, the storefronts of landed shuttles. The entire place was ready to take off at a moment’s notice. Mattie wandered off, and Ivan headed parallel to him, not close but never far.

Ivan shuffled through illegal wares—drugs, weaponry, rare foods and animals from Earth—without really paying attention to what he held. His attention was on the crowd around him, on the faces and forms of the unknown people who pressed up against him, who butted into him, who engulfed him. He had been with Mattie long enough to know when his pocket was being picked, but that was only one kind of defense against a crowd.

His attention finally was arrested by a display of art. Beautiful things for beauty’s sake tended not to show up in black markets like these. The only reason anyone would bring a work of art here was if it was stolen, and even then it would be hard to fence. Easier to sell ore and bullets. But here, in front of him, was an array of sculptures.

The shop owner watched him with a shrewd and beady eye as Ivan picked one up. It was surprisingly heavy: metal, Ivan realized. Metal down to the core. It had been cast in the shape of a woman, almond eye sightless from lack of iris and pupil. She gazed out of only one eye, because the skin of her face did not stretch all the way around her head. The bones of her shoulder pulled out of her skin like a woman shrugging off a blouse; her delicate metacarpals detached themselves from her flesh as if she were peeling away a glove.

The shop owner said, “It’s one of a kind.”

Ivan hefted that strange and troubling sculpture with one hand. The slow detachment of the skull from the woman’s flesh seemed inevitable, unstoppable, as if gravity were peeling away her skin, and soon only the metal bones would be left.

“Made by an artist on Mercury,” said the shop owner.

Fingers gripped his arm suddenly and with force. Ivan’s wild heart urged him to lash out, but his habit forced him to go very still, set the statue down again, and turn calmly to face the intruder.

Anji Chandrasekhar grinned at him, her earring flashing a deep crimson. “Hey, handsome.”

“Hello,” Ivan said, and left his choice of adjective to the discretion of the listener.

Anji released his arm for the sake of hurling herself at him for an embrace, her arms wrapping around his chest. The physical intimacy was unnecessary in Ivan’s opinion, but living with Mattie had shown him that his dislike of being touched was a rather Terran tendency.

Plus, he privately suspected that when Anji hugged him, she had serious designs on breaking his ribs.

“You look stressed,” she suggested when she pulled back, still gripping him by the shoulders.

“That’s a natural reaction to the sight of your face.”

“I’ve missed you, Leontios,” Anji said mistily.

“Anji!” Mattie pushed through the crowd, drawn, no doubt, by the psychic echo of Ivan’s physical distress. Anji released Ivan to hurl herself at Mattie as well, nearly knocking him over with the force of her affection. Mattie handled it better than Ivan had, grabbing her back as if the embrace were a contest of strength. By the look on his face when Anji let him go, he’d lost.

“Let’s get some privacy, gentlemen,” Anji said with a hand on each man’s arm. They left the figurine, and the watchful shopkeeper, behind.

Mattie said, “No Con?”

“Always a con,” Anji said with a bright teeth-flashing grin for the pun, “but no Constance this time.”

“You told us she would meet us here,” Ivan said.

“You’ve got me instead. Isn’t that better?”

“Ha,” said Mattie, and then, “Ow,” when Anji punched him on the arm.

“Is she all right?” Ivan asked.

“After the three of you left Luna, the System got her alone and interrogated her,” Anji said

Ivan’s mind filled with fast irrational flashes of Constance in chains, Constance drugged, Constance soaked in agonized sweat and spitting fury at her captors.

But Anji went on, “It was a friendly sort of interrogation, at least, as friendly as the System ever gets. They didn’t get anything out of her, and they don’t think there’s anything to get. Surveillance at her bar is up, of course. Oh, and that woman you wanted me to keep an eye out for was there—not in the room but in the same interrogation facility.”

“What woman?” Mattie wanted to know. Ivan said, “Ida Stays?”

Anji snapped her fingers. “Yes, her. The intelligence agent. Con never saw her, but she was there. None of this is the message Constance wanted me to give you, though. The message from Con is that you’re not to contact her.”

Mattie said, “At all?”

“She says if she really needs to contact you, Abigail will arrange a meeting.”

“Abigail” was Constance’s best and most effective pseudonym. She used that name only when it was unavoidable. Ivan was certain that Abigail would not be contacting Ivan and Mattie for any reason at all.

“And what if we need to talk to her?” Ivan asked.

Anji laughed. “We don’t make that call.”

“I need to talk to her, and I can’t wait five months to do it.”

“Ivan,” Anji said with exaggerated empathy, “you need to let her go. You two had a good thing for a while, but now it’s done, and chasing after her like this is just going to—”

“You can’t say what will happen between now and—when we go through with the plan. I don’t want things to end between us the way they did.”

Anji leaned in.

“You,” she said, and patted his cheek with one callused hand, “are a manipulative bastard. No, Ivan, I’m not going to convince Constance to meet you.”

“You’re a good dog, aren’t you?” Ivan said. “You bark on command.”

“And sit and roll over,” Anji agreed. There was no sign of the fear in her that Ivan felt, the fear that she should have felt, knowing what she did about Constance Harper and what Constance was willing to do.

Then again, perhaps Ivan was the only one who felt that fear. He was, after all, the one who had driven Constance to this.

Anji smiled at them both, bright and unfettered. “Now,” she said, “I’ve got some time to kill. Which of you knows how to show a girl a good time?”

FORWARD

“Another war?” Mattie said.

Anji grimaced, an odd look on a face Mattie was used to seeing with a carefree smile. “System fleet came through this system a few days ago. It went off, but it left some of its short-range ships behind. We’d all trenched ourselves down on the moons, but—”

“But Mattie and I just rang the dinner bell,” Ivan said.

“Exactly.”

They should have run, Mattie thought; the minute they saw the other ships, they should have picked up and run.

Ivan said, “You were going to fire on us. Why—”

“Talk later,” Mattie interrupted. “Which way should we go?”

“You won’t make it. Are you armed?”

Mattie had been so focused on speed when he’d chosen this ship from Constance’s fleet that he hadn’t thought enough about firepower. “This ship hasn’t got enough weapons to melt a comet.”

“Then you need to dock with me. The Pertinax has armor.”

Below Mattie’s spread arms, Ivan was calling something up on the computer. Anji’s face was suddenly shoved to one half of the viewscreen while the other half showed the Jovian system—and the sparks of light that were other ships, starting to converge.

There was no way for Mattie to tell which of those lights were Anji’s ships and which were System. “How long do we have?”

“Seven minutes.”

“I need at least a half hour to dock!”

“So start moving,” Anji said, and cut the connection. Jupiter and the starscape filled in the space where her head had been.

“I’m going to fucking kill her,” Mattie said.

Ivan already was getting up from the pilot’s seat. “I don’t think that would help.”

“It would help me.” The Pertinax was sending course information and permission to the Copenhagen already. Mattie scrambled to give the computer his instructions.

“What do you want me to do?”

There. Mattie located the Pertinax’s docking bay and aimed the Copenhagen for the other ship at the fastest speed he dared. “Have you changed your mind about prayer?”

Ivan grabbed for the back of Mattie’s chair. “If you don’t decrease our speed soon, I might reconsider.”

The Pertinax was staying perfectly still, its side angled toward Mattie, but the other three ships were spreading themselves out, weapons online. A small group of ships that had risen up from Io were arrowing toward this fragment of Anji’s fleet more swiftly than Mattie would have thought was possible.

Something flashed out by Ganymede. Two fragments of the fleets had collided.

The largest of Anji’s ships that had come to greet Mattie and Ivan, a sharp-edged disk of a stolen old System warship, sped forward through the sky toward the arrow of approaching System ships. Mattie hoped it would hold them off long enough for Mattie to dock.

The curved side of the Pertinax was filling almost all of the Copenhagen’s viewscreen. Mattie gritted his teeth and did not slow down.

“Uh, Mattie—”

“I know.”

Impact in ten—Mattie had to slow. He left scorch marks from his thrusters on the side of Anji’s ship. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.

The door to the docking bay of the Pertinax was already opening, visible as a flash of darkness in the ship’s gravitationally revolving side. Mattie started a theta movement that would bring him in synchronous orbit with that docking bay door—

Suddenly the Pertinax jolted, moving. Mattie grabbed the radio. “Pertinax, hold still.”

An unfamiliar male voice came on, presumably the Pertinax’s pilot. “The System ships have reached firing range. If we don’t move, we will—”

An explosion brightened the viewscreen and interrupted the call with static.

“—be hit,” the pilot finished.

Mattie was already catching up to the other ship and finding that revolving door. “Just don’t move!”

“This ship—”

Ivan grabbed the radio from Mattie. “Pertinax, this is Copenhagen,” he said pleasantly.

The Pertinax jolted again, and Mattie found himself facing revolving carbon and steel. He swore and pulled the Copenhagen’s nose up.

“If you move while we are trying to dock,” Ivan continued, still in the same very pleasant tone, “then we will collide with your hull and do far more damage than a System bomb.”

Anji’s voice came on. “We’re holding, Ivan. Get in.”

“Good,” Mattie snarled while Ivan held the communications equipment safely out of his reach, and when the Pertinax’s docking bay door appeared again, he dived down into it.

The Copenhagen landed hard, skidding, still half trying to revolve on its own. The shifted gravity threw them both forward—Mattie felt Ivan collide with his back—but nothing crashed and aside from a few dents in Anji’s floor, they were both undamaged. Behind them, the docking bay doors already were closing. Mattie watched the excruciatingly slow closing of the outer doors and the equally slow refilling of oxygen to the docking bay, every second waiting for a System bomb to tear through the hull of Anji’s ship.

When the computer beeped to signify the atmosphere was safe outside, Mattie shoved open the hull door and rushed out, Ivan at his heels.

One of Anji’s people was waiting for them. “This way,” she said, and rushed off into the hall.

Mattie went two steps before realizing Ivan was not beside him. He was behind, limping, face set. “Slow down,” Mattie snapped at Anji’s woman, and grabbed Ivan’s arm.

They hurried down the hall as fast as Ivan could go—Mattie gripped his elbow and thought about torn stitches and bleeding out on the Pertinax’s floor—and came out at last to the Pertinax’s control room. The ceiling of the control room was a semicircular viewscreen, giving them a 180-degree view. Mattie had a moment of disorientation, as if he had stepped out into open space, and overhead the dogfights flashed.

“Can we back out?” Anji was asking, pacing the space in front of the captain’s chair beneath that dome of stars. It was a curious relief to see her, the familiar way she walked, those glinting earrings. “The refugees—”

“If any more ships come this way, the Nemain can’t handle them,” said a gaunt man in the navigator’s chair, the same voice Mattie had heard through the radio on the Copenhagen.

“So pull out and we’ll deal with that when it comes.” Anji glanced their way, and her dark eyes widened until Mattie would have sworn they were taking up half the space on her shaved head. “Mattie!” She flung herself at him for a swift and fierce hug.

Mattie sucked in a breath to reinflate his lungs when she released him.

“Ivan!”

“No Leontios?” Ivan said, and looked startled when her arms settled around him with exceeding care. With Anji’s reaction, Mattie saw him anew: his shirt buttoned up to hide the marks on his neck imperfectly, bruised, pale, weary.

“I thought you were dead. You get an ‘Ivan’ for that. You could’ve had better timing—”

“You could’ve not tried to shoot us out of the sky. We sent the hounds signal. What were you—”

“Can we get out of here first?” Mattie interrupted, watching the clash between Anji’s Nemain and the System ships in the sky overhead.

Anji was shaking her head. “We can’t. I still have ships on the moons—”

“Doing what? If you really want to fight the System, you can come back later!”

“They’re collecting refugees,” Anji said. “I want out of here as much as you do, Mattie, but we have to wait.”

“You’re abandoning Jupiter?” Ivan frowned.

Anji spread her arms out toward the flashing sky. “With all possible speed!”

“That wasn’t in the plan.”

“Anji can tell us all about it later,” Mattie said. As far as he could tell from the lights flashing overhead, some of the System ships had slipped past the Nemain and were approaching the Pertinax. “Can you get your ships off those planets any faster?”

“If I could, I’d already be doing it,” Anji said.

“System ships are back in firing range,” the gaunt man reported.

“So move!” Anji snapped. She pressed a hand to her forehead. Mattie was disturbed to see it shaking. “Listen, boys, I know we need to talk—”

“Talk about how you’re at war with Constance now?” Ivan asked.

For a moment his words didn’t make sense. Mattie was still trying to piece them together when Anji said, “I’m not at war with Constance.”

“Which is why when we broadcast that we were from the Mallt-y-Nos, you tried to shoot us down.”

The Pertinax shuddered. It wasn’t a particularly agile ship, and Mattie would bet it hadn’t been able to dodge the first System bomb.

“Were you ever going to tell us?” Ivan asked when the Pertinax had steadied, and after this, Mattie was going to have a talk with him about priorities.

“Sure, Ivan, after we were done getting shot at!”

“The hull hasn’t been breached, but the armor is damaged in section 19,” the gaunt pilot reported.

“We need to draw them off,” Anji said. “Is the Macha back yet?”

“She’s on a course for us but trying to avoid System ships.”

“Tell Shara to hurry!”

Ivan said, “Anji.”

Anji made a swift gesture of frustration. “Constance and I have had a falling-out. Her way of doing things is going to get everyone killed, and I—and my people—would like not to die.”

It seemed fair enough to Mattie. He had the sense not to say so.

“We’re retreating to Saturn—there’s no System there. Half my fleet’s already over. I stayed here, getting refugees, waiting for you. I should’ve known you’d find a way to show up in the worst way possible.”

The barrage of attacks suddenly let up. The Nemain had been joined by two other ships, one a heavily armored troop carrier like the Pertinax, the other the exceedingly small and exceedingly fast ship that Mattie had noticed on their arrival.

“If you’re not at war,” said Ivan, “then why did you try to fire on us?”

“Because you know Con; she’s gonna be pissed. Either that or you were a System trap. I’m not your enemy; I was waiting here for you!”

Ivan said, “What if we told you we were still on Constance’s side?”

“I’d say I was hoping you’d say that,” Anji said, before Mattie could decide whether he should go for the gun that was not on his hip. She turned to her pilot, “Get Shara on the line; tell her we’re going to do the decoy but there are some people she needs to pick up first.”

Mattie reached desperately for some sense. “Who’s getting picked up?”

“You are. I was planning to send some ambassadors to Constance. The two of you can get to Con, and you can vouch for my people.”

Ivan said, “You just tried to shoot us down when you thought—”

“I don’t want a war! You’re going to negotiate with her so that I don’t feel like I might need to shoot down any of the Huntress’s ships that show up in my territory.”

No expression showed on Ivan’s carved-marble features. He said, “You could ally with Christoph if you’re that scared of Constance.”

“Christoph works for Constance,” Anji said. She waved an expansive hand to cut Ivan off. “We don’t have time. Will you vouch for my people with Constance?”

“What’s the catch?” Ivan asked.

“It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m sending you with a small diplomatic fleet that is also going to draw some of the System ships away so that we can get away with the refugees.”

Mattie said, “We’re your fucking decoys?”

“You’ll be perfectly safe.”

“No fucking way!”

An explosion of spectacular brightness filled the sky, nearly blinding Mattie in the second before the Pertinax’s computers could compensate for the brightness and dim the viewscreen output. A moment later he realized that the impressive display of firepower had come from the minuscule Badh.

“Listen,” said Anji. “I could’ve left this system days ago with the rest of my fleet, but I stayed, waiting for you. No matter what is going on between me and Constance, you are my friends and I will not let you get hurt.”

“And Constance isn’t your friend?” Ivan said.

“Constance is the Mallt-y-Nos first, my friend second. The two of you have never been what she is. Will you do it?”

If it was the only way to get out of this mess alive, Mattie would have danced naked underneath a full Terran moon for her. He nodded at Ivan.

Ivan’s jaw tightened. For a minute Mattie thought he would refuse out of some stupid principle, then he said, “We’ll do it.”

He must want to see Constance very badly, Mattie thought. Some emotion he refused to name jabbed unpleasantly at his heart.

“Good,” said Anji, and then suddenly, with helpless hysteria, she started to laugh. “But first you need to get off the Pertinax and redock on the Macha.”

FORWARD

It was easier to get off the Pertinax in midbattle than it had been to dock, but the Macha’s hull was sparking with explosions.

Mattie eyed it. “Do they know we’re coming?”

Ivan was already on the radio. “Macha, this is Copenhagen.”

A woman’s voice, tight with stress, answered the call. “This is Shara Court on the Macha. Who is speaking?”

“Leontios Ivanov on the Copenhagen.”

“Wait where you are. We’ll come to you.”

Ivan put the radio down. “She knows we’re here.”

One of the bright stars broke off of formation and headed for the Copenhagen. It was not the Macha.

“Great,” Mattie said. “So does the System.”

Ivan picked up the radio again. “Macha, this is Copenhagen.”

Mattie watched that star approach. “Would you put a little urgency in your voice?”

“We seem to have a System ship headed toward us,” Ivan continued, as if he hadn’t heard.

The radio buzzed. “Copenhagen, hold your position.”

The System ship was coming closer. In a minute, it would be near enough to fire. “Ivan—”

“Macha, we are about to be shot down,” Ivan said.

“Copenhagen, do not engage the enemy. We will come—”

“Macha,” said Ivan, “open your docking bay doors and hold your position. We’ll be there in a moment.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Mattie said.

Ivan set the radio down again. “Go for it,” he said, and Mattie jumped to relativistic speed.

He came out of it less than a second later, shaking, the Copenhagen shaking around him with the sudden stresses. A hundred warnings started to flash on the screen before him: the Copenhagen’s hull was pitted with debris that had impacted at high speed. But they were only a few kilometers away from the Macha now.

The docking bay door started to open only after they arrived. Presumably Shara Court hadn’t believed they’d do it. Bombs were still flashing against the Macha’s cylindrical hull. Mattie started to spiral inward toward that massive cylinder, matching its rotation speed, keeping well outside the impact zone of the bombs.

He was just getting up to speed when the System ships noticed him. He had to drop back out of rotation as a bomb exploded where he had been a second earlier. “Fuck.”

“There’s another one coming up behind us,” Ivan warned.

“I can’t—”

A second bomb went off and sent the Copenhagen spiraling away from the Macha. The first System ship was wheeling around, heading toward Mattie and Ivan.

Ivan was back on the radio. “Macha, can we get some help?”

“You’re in our blind zone,” Shara snapped. “Our weapons can’t reach. This is why I told you to wait.”

Mattie spared a glance for the rest of the field as he tried to get back into line with the rotation of the Macha. The Nemain was some distance away, holding off the rest of the System ships. “What about the—”

The System ship diving at them suddenly exploded, flames choking out in vacuum, debris flashing in distant sunlight. A moment later, the second System ship suffered the same fate.

Ivan got back on the radio while Mattie was still admiring the maneuver. “Please pass on our compliments to the captain of the Badh. Also, we are about to crash-land into your docking bay.”

He shut off the radio before Shara could protest. Mattie aligned the Copenhagen with the Macha’s rotation, aimed for the bright spot in its hull, and hurtled down.

The Copenhagen struck the docking bay floor hard, bouncing once, thrusters blackening the inside of the ship. The docking bay doors were closing before the Copenhagen had finished moving.

Mattie quickly checked their systems. The ship would need some repair—he didn’t even want to see what the hull looked like right now—but there was nothing too badly broken.

Behind him, Ivan was picking himself up from the floor. “You are exceptional at landing a crashing ship.”

It was absurd that the compliment could please Mattie so much, especially when at any moment they might be blown to pieces. “Let’s just find the captain.”

FORWARD

Captain Shara Court had sent four people down to pick them up. Anji, Ivan remembered, had sent only one. By the time the atmosphere had leveled enough for Ivan and Mattie to disembark from the Copenhagen, those four people were openly gaping at the damage Mattie’s landing had done to their docking bay. They led Mattie and Ivan up to the control room, which was identical to the Pertinax’s, with the starscape forming a dome overhead.

The moment Ivan and Mattie crossed the threshold, a rail-thin redheaded woman turned on them. “Which of you is the captain?” she demanded.

“Both?” Mattie said.

“I don’t know what either of you was thinking, but next time, when I tell you to stay away, you stay away!”

“Our apologies,” Ivan said. “You must be Captain Court. I’m Ivan, and this is Mattie—”

“I know who you are.”

So much for charm. Ivan said, “What’s our status?”

“We’re out of the Jovian system, being pursued by the majority of the System ships.”

Ivan craned his neck toward the viewscreen overhead. There was a cloud of stars visible as a movement against the background constellations: the System pursuit.

“How long are we going to let them follow us?” Mattie asked.

Shara Court had the skin of one knuckle between her teeth as she stared up at the pack of ships in pursuit. She said, “We’re not letting them follow us.”

“We’re trying to outrun them?”

“We couldn’t drive them off too early; they’d’ve gone back to Jupiter before Anji could pull out with the refugees.”

“So now they’re going to shoot us down instead!”

It was almost enough to make Ivan smile, bitter and humorlessly amused. “The cost of being the decoy,” he said.

“They haven’t caught us yet,” Shara snapped, but her voice was thin with anxiety. She seated herself in the captain’s chair and got on the radio. The indents of her teeth showed white, then red, on her knuckle. “Nemain, they’re almost in firing range.”

The radio buzzed, and a man’s voice came on. “We’ll engage.” A moment later, the disk of the Nemain wheeled between the Macha and the cluster of small System ships.

The System ships couldn’t be that fast if the System had left them behind on Jupiter rather than taking them with the rest of the fleet. “How fast can the Macha travel?” Ivan asked.

Shara’s hands were claws on the armrests of her chair. “We’re lucky if we can reach 0.01 percent lightspeed. This is a transport ship, not fast travel.”

Ivan had known the Macha would be slow, but the number astounded him. It would take them half a year at least to reach Mars.

The System fleet, wherever it was, would reach Constance before them.

“How many people on board the Macha?” Ivan asked.

“We’re full up with troops. Some of the other ships were trying to make room for refugees.” Shara touched the communications beside the captain’s chair. “Nemain, status?”

A man’s voice came irritably over the radio. “We’re fine.”

“You’re surrounded. Pull back.”

“We’re trying to drive them off, remember?” said the Nemain, and the connection went dead.

Shara switched channels. “Macha to Badh. Vithar, can you get to them?”

“Yes,” said a man’s deep voice, and a moment later an explosion flashed from the middle of the System ships that were now worrying the Nemain. Ivan did not see the ship that had fired; the Badh was too small to be visible.

The System ships weren’t being driven back. If anything, they were renewing their attack. While most of them converged on the wheeling Nemain, some split off, heading for the Macha. Ivan watched them grow larger in the viewscreen overhead.

“Can’t you go any faster?” Mattie demanded.

“This ship is not designed for speed,” Shara said through her teeth. She ordered her navigator, “Fire on those ships when they’re near enough.”

They were near enough. The Macha fired, but the agile System ships dodged the bombs easily. Their weapons systems lit up, and at this distance the massive Macha would be impossible to miss.

The nearest System ship exploded. This time, Ivan caught sight of the Badh, minuscule, moving with impossible speed to flank the other System ships before they could even register that one of their own had been destroyed. It took swift care of the others, and the last System ship, distracted by the Badh, was blown apart by the Macha.

Next to Ivan, Mattie blew out an unsteady breath.

In the chaos, the Macha had nearly left the Nemain behind: the flashing battle between it and the System ships was a spark of distant light. Shara got back on the radio. “Nemain, leave them and join us.”

The returning call was more fuzzed with static than it should have been. The Nemain’s communications had been damaged somehow. “If we join you, they’ll follow. The Nemain is faster than the Macha. We’ll deal with these and catch up.”

“We’re not leaving you behind,” Shara said.

“We’ll catch up.”

“Take the Badh with you.”

“The Macha needs the Badh’s weaponry if you encounter any more ships. We’ll catch up.” The line to the Nemain went dead.

Shara leaned back in her chair, worrying at her knuckle again. “Keep going,” she ordered her navigator, and the explosions of the battle dimmed with distance.

“Wait for the Nemain,” Ivan suggested. “Send the Copenhagen on ahead. We’ll get to Constance, pave the way for your fleet.”

Shara’s eyes were on where the Nemain had last been. “My orders were to take you to Harper safely, not let you fly off at the first opportunity.”

“With the Macha’s speed, it will take half a year to reach Mars, if not more,” Ivan said. Mattie was trying to catch his eye for some reason, but Ivan didn’t dare take his attention from Shara until he had won. “The Copenhagen can get there in a matter of weeks.”

“We’re not separating,” Shara snapped.

“So you’d hold us against our will?”

“I’m keeping you safe!” She threw up her hands to forestall any further objection. “When the Nemain returns, we can discuss it with Captain Laran.”

All sight of the Nemain or the dozens of System ships surrounding it had vanished into the black. Somewhere up ahead, the System fleet was roaring in toward Constance Harper, faster than the Macha could ever travel.

Shara was so tense that Ivan could see the tendons standing out in her wiry arms. He couldn’t push her any further, not yet.

“When the Nemain returns,” Ivan agreed.

FORWARD

The nice thing about a really large ship like the Macha, Mattie thought, was how stable it felt. There was no dizziness from artificial gravity straining to apply itself evenly. Layers of armor separated him and Ivan—and everyone else in the ship—from the breathless danger of the cold outside. Even the steady acceleration of their movement was almost imperceptible from inside the ship. What they gained in stability they lost in speed, of course, but if it came to danger there was always the Badh. And the Nemain, once it returned.

It could have been, in fact, an ideal situation.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Mattie said, remembering to lower his voice halfway through the sentence when two Macha crewmen appeared farther down the hall.

“I was thinking that if we wait seven months to reach Constance, the System fleet will get to her first,” said Ivan.

“You just antagonized the woman hosting us.”

“Would you rather not have known we were prisoners?”

“I would rather you’d talked to me first!”

It was amazing how precisely Ivan could control his expressions sometimes. The look he slanted at Mattie had only a knife’s edge of incredulity in it, razor thin, razor sharp. “Sorry,” Ivan said. “Next time I will make sure to confirm any obvious conclusions with you first. Should we check on the Copenhagen?”

The Copenhagen did need repair. Mattie ran his hands over the hull of it while Ivan ran diagnostics from inside. At least, Mattie thought, most of the repairs could be done aboard the Macha.

He was just trying to decide if it was worth replacing the hull plates on the living space entirely when the message came over the intercom to clear the docking bay.

Once Ivan and Mattie were clear, a peculiar ship that was more engine and armament than living space docked beside the Copenhagen. That, Mattie realized, must be the Badh.

The doors to the docking bay hissed open, and Mattie followed Ivan back inside, heading toward the new ship. A lantern-jawed man with dreadlocks hanging long down his back uncurled himself from the Badh. He was strangely familiar.

Ivan reached the man a step ahead of Mattie. “You must be the captain of the Badh.”

“You must be the son of Milla Ivanov,” the man said. He had a low, sonorous voice, and Mattie knew him from somewhere.

“You saved our lives out there,” Ivan said. “Thank you, Captain…?”

“Vithar,” Mattie said suddenly, the name returning to him in a flash of memory. “You’ve worked with Constance before.” He couldn’t remember quite what Vithar had done for her. It bothered him that he could remember the face and the name but not how or why.

“A long time ago.” Vithar offered his hand to Mattie. His grip was cool and firm.

“Your ship has no crew,” Ivan remarked. He was right; the Badh was too small to fit anyone but its captain inside. “Will you be docking on the Macha?”

“Most of the time,” Vithar said.

Ivan seemed to wait, but no more information, as far as Mattie could see, was forthcoming. Ivan said, “The Badh is a remarkable ship.”

“I like it.”

Again, that stalled silence. Ivan said, “Where did you get it from?”

“Ganymede.”

Mattie had to cover his mouth with his hand under the guise of scrubbing at his stubble so that Vithar wouldn’t see him grin. Ivan’s expression hadn’t changed, remaining pleasant with the rigidity of a computer program stalling in the face of unexpected information. It was rare to see Ivan stonewalled.

Ivan said, “You’re the spy.”

That got a reaction. “What?” Vithar said.

“Stealthy little ship, flying alone, resistant to interrogation.” A smile took some of the edge off Ivan’s words—but not all. “You’re Anji’s spy.”

“I’m her diplomat.”

“You’re the one who’s supposed to talk to Constance?” Mattie interjected.

“Yes.”

“Well,” Mattie said, “good fucking luck.”

Ivan said, “I could make your life easier. Send Mattie and me ahead in the Copenhagen. We can reach Constance long before the Macha and pave the way for your arrival.”

Vithar looked at him sidelong. “Did you suggest this to Captain Court?”

“Of course.”

“She denied you.”

“She was inclined to wait for the Nemain’s return.”

Vithar looked amused. “Then we will wait for the Nemain.”

Ivan seized on that amusement, smiling himself, so fully focused on Vithar that Mattie was starting to feel peculiarly invisible. “Captain Court’s only objection was our safety. Do I seem like a man who can’t take care of himself? Does Mattie?”

“You’re clearly very capable,” Vithar said with a wry half of a smile, and suddenly it wasn’t funny or impressive that Ivan could get a reaction out of him, and Mattie wanted him to leave. “But if Shara says we wait for the Nemain, then we wait for the Nemain.”

Ivan held his gaze for another excruciating moment, then leaned back, shrugging, graceful. “As you say.”

“I should speak with Shara,” Vithar said.

“I’m sure we’ll speak again soon,” Ivan said.

“I’m sure we will.” Vithar walked off, shaking his head.

Mattie stood stiffly, caught in the obscure feeling that if he moved too suddenly, whatever self-control usually encased him would shatter. “Making friends?” Mattie said when Vithar was gone, hearing the tightness of his own voice and hating the sound.

Ivan was still looking in the direction Vithar had gone. “Apparently not.”

“Good,” Mattie said, then dared to move his arms, stuffing his hands deep into his pockets. “I’m going to fix the Copenhagen before the Nemain gets back.”

He was aware of Ivan’s gaze on his back, but he did not dare turn around to see what his expression might be.

BACKWARD

They’d been hunting this quarry for days. This was all in good fun for Mattie—he’d always loved puzzles, and here were he and Ivan solving a puzzle in a sneaky, underhanded way—but Ivan seemed almost unbearably tense.

Case in point: when Ivan spotted the System agent they were tailing, he gripped Mattie’s arm a shade too tightly to stop him and said, every syllable ringing despite his lowered voice, “There he is.”

“Where? Brown hair and briefcase?”

“Who else?” Ivan released his arm. “He’s going into that restaurant.”

A traveling System agent had to eat eventually, after all. Even a System intelligence agent.

The restaurant the man was going into was not the kind of place Mattie would go to get a meal; actually, Mattie wasn’t sure when he’d ever been in a proper restaurant before. They didn’t have those things on Miranda, and a fugitive felon like himself usually found it unwise to sit that long in one place, especially one so heavily surveilled and with so few easy exits. Ivan, though, probably had been in hundreds of them before. Mattie had heard Terra had a lot.

The man vanished inside the dusty red Martian stone edifice of the building. Through the windows, Mattie could see that the interior had been designed with Old Earth in mind. White stone pillars held up the roof; bright light streamed from overhead in imitation of the Terran sun.

Ivan leaned against the wall of the building while Mattie squinted in. “What do you think?”

“I think they should fire him,” Mattie said. “Leaving that sweet little computer all alone and undefended on a chair like that.”

Ivan did not smile, as Mattie had hoped. “So you can get the device on the case?”

“I need to put the device on the computer itself,” Mattie pointed out. “He has to be very distracted not to notice that.”

Ivan twisted his neck to peer in the window. To anyone who passed, they would look like two friends debating whether to get lunch at that restaurant. Yet Mattie could see the tension in his shoulders even through his jacket.

When he turned back around to face Mattie, he was smiling, but it was not an especially nice smile. “We can distract him with a little honey, I think.”

Mattie peered back in to see what Ivan was talking about. As he did, the System agent turned his head and Mattie got a good look at his face. He had a sharp jaw and a strong, jutting chin and bright eyes that crinkled at the corners even though his lips did not curve when he greeted the waiter. It was a remarkably Terran sort of smile, and something about it made Mattie’s heart hit an extra beat.

He also saw what Ivan had meant when the man’s gaze lingered noticeably on his male waiter as the waiter walked away.

“Oh, please,” Mattie said, “let me throw myself on this grenade for you.”

“We’re not going to let this grenade get off,” Ivan said, “and thank you, but I’ll do the talking. Drop something when we pass his table.”

And then he swept off into the restaurant. Asshole.

Mattie caught up with Ivan in two long strides, the benefit of superior height, and quickly racked his brain about what he might be able to drop in front of the man that wasn’t completely illegal. Somehow he thought that if he let his collection of lock picks fall on the floor the System intelligence agent might become distracted by the wrong thing.

When they started to walk past the man’s table—he did look up, Mattie noticed, discreetly but not discreetly enough to watch Ivan pass—Mattie tripped over nothing and let a handful of computer data storage chips spill out of his pocket and strew themselves over the Earth-stone floor. The chips held an enormous volume of illegal information, but the man had no way of knowing that from looking at them.

“Shit,” he said very loudly to complement the commotion he had already made.

Ivan gave him an exasperated look.

“Are you all right?” the man asked Mattie, not without a brief glance at Ivan, who had stopped right alongside the man’s chair.

Mattie waved a hand, then got onto his knees to start picking up the tiny flakes.

“He’s fine. He’s always dropping something,” Ivan said to the man. His accent had switched to the way it had sounded when Mattie had met him a decade ago—posh and cultured. It took Mattie aback to realize how much Ivan’s accent had softened since then. He fancied sometimes that Ivan had picked up a bit of Mattie’s own Mirandan drawl.

The man turned in his chair, angling his body toward Ivan. “You’re Terran.”

Ivan smiled. “On vacation,” he said. “I wish now that I’d gone to Venus instead.”

When Mattie had dropped the chips, he’d made certain some of them rolled beneath the chair that held the System agent’s computer. Picking up the chips, he slowly worked his way under the table toward that chair.

“Venus is very nice, especially the northern hemisphere,” the man was saying. “Have you been there before?”

“Not recently.” Ivan hooked his foot around a chair and tugged it out. It screeched by Mattie’s ear, and Mattie glared at Ivan’s ankle. “I went there with my aunt when I was a child, and I still remember the jungle flowers. Mattie, I suppose I should ask if you need help.”

“No,” Mattie said. “I got it. I’m fine.”

“Right,” said Ivan. “Have you been to Venus often?”

“I travel around for my job,” the Systems agent said.

“Oh?” Ivan gave the vowel an arch turn. “What’s that?”

Mattie had heard him flirt with strangers a thousand times before—it was often their only way to get what they wanted—but somehow, something about listening to him flirt now was disturbing. Now fully under the table, Mattie very carefully reached out and began to pick the locks holding the briefcase shut.

“If I told you,” said the man, “I’d have to kill you.”

Ivan laughed. Mattie scowled darkly at the briefcase.

“You’re a dangerous man, then,” Ivan said with a hint of his own wolf’s teeth in his voice, and Mattie scowled even more deeply.

“And you?” the man asked. “What do you do?”

“I travel.”

The briefcase came unlocked. Mattie pulled the tiny device from his pocket.

“Oh?” said the man in a fair imitation of Ivan’s earlier exclamation. “You’ve been many places, then?”

Mattie slipped his hand into the briefcase and planted his and Ivan’s tiny device on the surface of the man’s computer.

“I’ve been around,” Ivan said.

Mattie relocked the briefcase, grabbed the last few data storage chips from the floor, and stood up so quickly that he banged the table on the way to his feet.

“I got them all,” he said to Ivan, and then—reluctantly—nodded once at the Systems agent. The agent was looking at Mattie with one brow arched. He’d looked very attractive in profile from the window, Mattie remembered, but up close and straight on there was a meanness to his features. That would be the System for you, Mattie thought.

“Come on,” he said to Ivan, and Ivan’s eyebrow arched as well—Terrans, Mattie thought, annoyed—but he stood up.

“Do you still want to eat?” Ivan asked him politely, still in his poshest accent.

“No,” Mattie said. “I don’t think I’m hungry.”

Ivan turned back to the man and Mattie imagined he was giving him an apologetic sort of look, but Mattie already was walking out of the restaurant. He stepped out onto the Martian stone and breathed in the clean Martian air with some relief. The sunlight here was not as intense as the light inside the restaurant had been.

Ivan was at his shoulder a moment later. “Good thinking,” he said, and followed at Mattie’s shoulder when Mattie set off for where they had landed the Annwn.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean good job getting us out of there.”

It hadn’t been a particularly good job; Mattie had essentially just dragged Ivan out, but Ivan didn’t sound sarcastic. Instead of trying to parse out what Ivan meant, Mattie said, “Why didn’t you let me do the talking?”

“Because I always do the talking.”

“But it was a man,” Mattie said.

“I know how to drive stick,” said Ivan.

“What?”

But Ivan already was heading into a narrow alleyway farther down the street, tugging the computer out of Mattie’s jacket pocket. “Come on. I want to find out what we can before he notices what we planted on him.”

Mattie had the little computer out and in his hand in a moment. The computer would connect to the device Mattie had planted on the System agent’s computer back in the restaurant. System intelligence agents, when traveling, had to be very careful about security, yet they had to travel frequently and could not always trust the government outpost hosting them to hold the sensitive information they needed. So sometimes they brought portable computers with a direct connection to System intelligence information, a connection that could be accessed only from that physical computer itself.

Unless, say, a pair of crafty strangers had planted a device like Mattie’s on the computer to interrupt the computer’s electric processes and hijack them with his own commands. Mattie went to work persuading the System to let him sign in to its data and tried to enjoy the puzzle again.

It didn’t take long before he was in. He passed the handheld to Ivan wordlessly.

Ivan nearly snatched it from his hand. Mattie couldn’t see the screen, and so he watched Ivan’s face instead, the way the quality of the light reflected off it changed as Ivan moved from place to place on the screen in front of him.

At long last Ivan sighed. “She’s alive.”

“Of course she is,” Mattie said, baffled.

Ivan flicked him a glance. “They arrested her after we left Luna, Mattie. Anything could have happened.”

Mattie doubted it. Constance could take care of herself. Constance always had taken care of herself, and more than that, she’d taken care of Mattie as well. There wasn’t a chance the System could take her down.

“There’s nothing else in here,” Ivan said with that peculiar tension in his voice again. It made Mattie’s gut twist the same way it had before. “I don’t know what happened.”

“I can get into contact with Anji,” Mattie said. “Con can’t get into contact with us, but I bet she can talk to Anji. I’ll have Anji get a message to her. Set up a rendezvous.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know,” Mattie said. “It depends on Anji and on Constance.”

He almost asked Ivan then, Why? Why do you need to see her so badly? What is it you need to say?

He did not. He was not certain he wanted to know the answer, and so he carefully set the thoughts aside.

“Contact Anji,” Ivan said. “Ask her to set up a rendezvous. Tell her we need to see Constance soon.”

FORWARD

After the first week with no sign of the Nemain, Ivan appealed to Shara again.

She wasn’t pleased by his opening the subject. “The Nemain will catch up.”

“The Nemain was surrounded by System ships. If it’s not here by now, they destroyed it.”

Shara’s sudden pallor was stark against the orange of her hair. “The Macha had a head start. We’re not giving up on them yet.”

“The Copenhagen—”

“We’re not splitting up, not until the Nemain gets back,” Shara snapped. “And even then, it’s only up for discussion. Our orders were to escort you there.”

“If you won’t let us leave, you’re not escorting us, you’re imprisoning us,” Ivan said.

“We wait for the Nemain,” said Shara.

After that, she took to avoiding him. The Macha was a large ship, and she was quite effective at hiding in it. Ivan’s next opportunity to speak with her directly did not come until he and Mattie were summoned to the war room to discuss some new intelligence Vithar had received.

“Sit, gentlemen,” Shara said when they arrived. She tapped at the holographic display on the table that filled the room. The glittering stars blacked out, replaced with a face-on view of the solar system, planets marked in exaggerated size. “Shut the door.”

Mattie shut the door. Ivan seated himself, carefully hiding his limp. “Did you find the Nemain?”

If looks could eviscerate, Ivan’s organs would have been splayed out around him like butterfly wings, and his beating heart would have been jolting down to stillness in the middle of the holographic table. Shara said, “We received a message this morning that may change our status.” With another brief touch she brought up an overlay onto the table, moons in static whirling. Oversized images of the Macha, Badh, and Copenhagen appeared at their approximate location in the asteroid belt—still so far from Mars and Constance Harper—alongside ghostly, uncertain images of the System fleet spread out through space.

A marker for the Nemain had been left where the other ship had last been seen, gray, like a tombstone. Ivan eyed the lost ship and the System ships around it until Shara’s next words shattered his concentration:

“Christoph Bessel has declared war on the Mallt-y-Nos.”

“War?” Ivan said.

“War.” Under Shara’s touch a smaller cluster of ships up by Neptune brightened, aimed inward, toward Mars. Not just the System but Christoph as well: the cage was closing around Constance Harper.

Mattie said, “Christoph was an asshole. But why do we care? He’s way out by Neptune.”

“Precisely.” Shara’s gesture covered the field: Constance on one side, besieged, Christoph on the other, a free agent to be fought or allied with, and Anji in between.

Ivan said, “What does this mean for us, Captain Court?”

“That’s what we’re here to decide.” Shara looked at Vithar. “Opinion?”

Vithar was eyeing the table thoughtfully. “Christoph has said nothing regarding Anji. His route to the inner solar system takes him wide of Saturn.”

“She may want to ally with Christoph.”

“Hang on,” said Mattie, while Ivan’s blood ran cold.

“Perhaps we should return to Saturn—leave a message for the Nemain—and see where Anji would prefer to send us.”

Ivan felt as if slender icy fingers had closed around his heart and clenched. Leave Constance behind to face the System alone—and the last time he and Mattie had faced captivity, at least they’d had the option of a bomb on a timer. “What would happen to us if you did?” Ivan asked.

“That would be for Anji to decide.”

“Anji’s orders were clear,” Vithar interrupted. “Constance Harper is her old friend; we ally with the Huntress.”

“I want that confirmed by Anji,” Shara said.

Vithar’s brows lifted, but he kept his annoyance well contained. “I will confirm, but we will continue on our course for Mars.”

“Perhaps we should wait.”

“We continue on,” Vithar said.

Ivan thought Shara would argue with him. She’d paled again, the way she did when she was angry or under stress. But the intercom rang before she could respond.

Shara hit the interface on the table. “What is it?”

“There’s a ship ahead, Captain.”

“A System ship?”

“Unclear. It’s not responding to our hails.”

“Approach with caution. I’ll be up in a moment.” She shut the intercom down. “We’ll continue on to Mars. For now, I need you in the Badh. We may need offensive abilities.”

Vithar was already half out the door. He lifted two fingers in acknowledgment, and left.

A strange ship, all alone. Maybe System. Maybe not. Ivan said, “Let me and Mattie see it.”

“What? The ship?”

What else? But he reined his temper in. “We might be able to help.”

The Macha had been a long way off from the strange ship when the alarm had been raised. By the time they were near enough to get detailed scans, the Badh was zipping around overhead. Ivan leaned on the railing separating the upper level of the Macha’s control room from the lower, staring toward the distant ship, half expecting to see a graceful seashell spiral emerge out of the black.

“Life support is on, but the engines don’t seem to be working,” one of the Macha’s crewmen reported.

Mattie was all nervous energy next to Ivan, jittering his leg when he leaned against the railing. Ivan said to the crewman, “How large is the ship?”

“Civilian class. Smaller than the Nemain and unarmed.”

“Centripetal gravitation,” Mattie said under his breath to Ivan, pointedly.

Ivan asked, “Any contact yet?”

Shara was trying to hail the other ship from the captain’s chair. “Either they’re not answering or they can’t answer.”

“Maybe there’s something wrong with their computers.”

“If they’re not a threat, we could just fly past,” Mattie suggested.

“They’re revolutionaries in need of assistance or they’re System lying low, hoping we’ll fly past,” Shara said. “We have to find out which.”

“Let me and Mattie try to get into their computer,” Ivan said.

“Can you?”

Mattie laughed. Ivan said, “Yes.”

Shara hesitated a moment longer, biting her lip, before giving way to the inevitable. “Do it.”

The woman trying to get through the other ship’s computers ceded her place to Ivan and Mattie immediately. Ivan leaned on the chair, watching the screen, while Mattie studied what could be seen of the other ship’s computers.

The other ship’s hardware seemed to be working: it was broadcasting something at the Macha. The broadcast itself was nonsense.

“Think they’re trying to radio us?” Ivan asked.

“Yeah, maybe, and something got scrambled.”

“What can you learn about the ship?” Shara asked.

Ivan read off what Mattie had managed to pull up. “It’s a civilian-class ship with a standard crew component of seventy souls. The name is the Huldren.” He seated himself at the computer interface beside Mattie and began to check the old System records stored on the Macha for information about a starship called Huldren.

Mattie asked, “Can Vithar see any modifications?”

Vithar’s voice crackled out of the radio. “The ship has weaponry. It doesn’t look original.”

It was an old skill, well used, to get into the System data banks. Ivan had the information he wanted in an instant. “The Huldren was a transport ship owned by a private company that operated out of Venus. Last reported location was Venus, right before Earth was hit.”

“System civilians, looking to escape?” Shara suggested.

“System civilians wouldn’t head to the outer planets,” Ivan said.

Mattie was already elbow deep inside the other ship’s metaphorical guts. It looked like he had been testing various System backdoors, trying to get into the computer, but the backdoors had been blocked off. Definitely revolutionaries.

The code was odd, though. “It’s garbled,” Ivan said.

Mattie was intent. “I don’t think it’s on purpose.”

“Can you get in?” Shara asked.

“I think I—uh, yes,” Mattie said, and Ivan saw what had surprised him. One of the more uncommon System backdoors had been left, metaphorically speaking, wide open, as if someone had taken remote control of the other ship and then left without reverting the change.

“I got the communications,” Mattie said. “Want to talk?”

Shara nodded and lifted a hand, signaling for silence. She said, “This is the revolutionary ship Macha. Where is your allegiance?”

Static. Then, rising like mist out of the ground, high and tight and frightened, came a woman’s voice, the words lost to the snow.

Some unnamable weight seemed to rest more heavily on Ivan’s shoulders, the approach of some creeping dark. He wondered why none of the other crew members seemed to sense it as he did. Even an elk felt the nearness of the wolf.

“…Huldren,” the woman’s static-drowned voice begged. “This is the revolutionary ship Huldren. Please respond. This is the revolutionary ship Huldren. Please…”

“We can hear you,” said Shara. “Who is speaking?”

“My name is Grace Kim. The rest of the crew is gone. They’re dead. The ship won’t move. The ship, it…”

“We’re going to help you, Grace,” Shara said. “Mattie and Ivan, can you restore power to the Huldren?”

Mattie sounded doubtful. “We might be able to get you a video connection.”

“Do it.”

A black square opened up on the screen, obscuring the stars ahead, the Badh circling the still-distant Huldren. For a moment, nothing was visible but darkness, nothing audible except heaving, tear-edged breaths.

Then a pale blue light flickered like lightning. The woman sitting in front of the screen flinched away, one arm coming up to conceal her face. The blue light gleamed off her black hair, off the metal joints that covered her arm. The light was coming from in front of her, but all behind her—what little was visible of an empty piloting room, chairs askew, instrumentation dark—was still in blackness.

The Huldren’s interior lights had failed, Ivan realized. The only light in the room now was from the video connection to the Macha that Mattie had just opened.

Ivan wondered how long she had been in the dark.

Grace lowered her arm, squinting hard even into the dimness of the computer screen’s light. The metal was not covering her arm: it was a prosthetic. Ivan could see the places where metal joined to flesh, rivets sunk deep into muscle to join with bone and a thin ridge of skin trying to grow up and over the metal beside it. When she moved the arm, pulleys and wires flexed. She was a revolutionary, certainly. A System soldier would have a much more expensive prosthetic.

Shara said, “We’re trying to repair your ship’s computer now.”

“No,” Grace said. “No, don’t—leave it. Please, please just get me out of here.”

“We’ll get you out of there.”

While Shara spoke to Grace and Mattie monitored the fluctuating communications equipment, Ivan took a look at the rest of the Huldren’s systems. They were just as deeply damaged, but there was something peculiar about the damage, a sort of logic hidden in the chaos. Ivan wondered if someone had tried to reprogram the ship without fully understanding its hardware.

One piece of nonsense appeared over and over: R = ae^bθ. The equation for a logarithmic spiral. When Ivan paid attention to that signature, he found that it marked every change that had been made to the computer.

“Tell us what happened,” Shara said.

“The others all died,” Grace said. She had gone from nearly sobbing to eerily affectless. That would be shock, Ivan thought. “The ship went crazy…it started thrashing around. My arm,” she said, lifting that mechanical limb of hers, light glittering off hidden gears, “was strong enough to hold me…I wasn’t injured. I could get to the oxygen suits when the life support went down.”

A logarithmic spiral. It was nonsense code; it did nothing to the Huldren except mark it. Ivan said to Grace, his eyes still on that signature, “That’s quite a malfunction.”

“It wasn’t a malfunction. There was another ship. It looked like a spiral. It did this.”

Ivan raised his head and looked her in the eye. He had known; the moment the Macha had reported another ship nearby, he had known, as if a shadow had touched his skin. He could see that same shadow-touched terror in Grace’s eyes.

He said, “A ship with mass-based gravitation.”

“Yes,” Grace breathed.

“You know it?” Shara wanted to know.

“I may know of it,” Ivan said.

“Just a rumor,” Mattie said sharply.

“Is it System?”

“Not anymore,” said Ivan.

“We tried to speak to it when it came,” Grace said. “It wouldn’t answer us. All the holograms lit up and a woman appeared, but she wouldn’t speak…”

“Grace, where has the spiral ship gone?” Shara asked.

“I don’t know.”

Shara had her knuckle between her teeth again. Some unease had drawn lines around her eyes. She felt it, too, Ivan thought—the edge of a shadow from something vast and terrible fallen over her shoulder. But unlike Ivan, she would have no name to put to it. “We’ll have someone over there in a shuttle very soon,” Shara said. “Just hold on. It’s all over now.”

In time with her words, brightness flared on the screen. Grace flinched, hands coming up to her head as if mere light could do her damage.

The rest of the Huldren’s control room was suddenly illuminated. “I got the lights,” Mattie said unnecessarily.

Behind Grace, in the far back corner of the Huldren’s control room, a hologram began to take shape. At the same time, a light on the communications panel came on, and the Macha’s computer began to chime.

“We’re receiving a message from the Huldren,” one of the Macha’s crew members reported.

“I’m not sending anything,” Grace said.

“Mattie, Ivan, is it possible that whatever’s wrong with the Huldren’s computers could affect the Macha?” Shara asked sharply.

Behind Grace, a female shape was forming on the holographic terminal. An arm pushed out against the static like a child’s kicking foot from within the womb—

The hologram vanished. Mattie was staring at Ivan in open concern, the computer display in front of him showing that while Ivan had been distracted, he had gone into the Huldren and killed the hologram before it could be born.

“Could this hurt the Macha?” Shara demanded again.

“It doesn’t matter. I intercepted; the message is nonsense,” Mattie said shortly. He was leaning onto the screen in front of him, his arms covering part of the display.

When Ivan leaned over, Mattie shifted, reluctant, and let him read the message he was hiding.

“Grace, we are sending a shuttle over now,” Shara said, and indicated that the communication should be cut. When it had been, she ordered her people, “Send a shuttle to the Huldren immediately. Rescue that woman and anyone else who might be alive but do not have any contact with the computers, understood?”

Ivan said, “I know the ship that did this.”

Shara said, “How?”

“I’m a well-traveled man.” Ivan left the computer interface, seeing Mattie wipe the message from the Huldren from the Macha’s memory. “That ship can do what it did to the Huldren to the Macha, or the Badh, or any other ship it likes—and if it hit the Huldren, it’s nearby.”

That ship should have been months away by now, far enough from the solar system that the sun would be no more than a brighter star. Instead, she was here, warping the motion of the planets with her pull. There was a sense of the inevitable to it—the wrists had already been cut, and there was nothing left to do but wait until he bled out.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Shara demanded.

“I didn’t know she was still around. But Mattie and I know how to defend your ships against her.”

“How?”

Ivan lifted a shoulder. “There’s a price.”

Her expression twisted. “You’d demand payment?”

“Only that you let us take the Copenhagen and go on ahead.”

“Anji told me about you,” Shara said. Her bony hands had curled into fists on her chair. “You’ve never mentioned this ship before, and I wouldn’t dare let you into my ship’s computers. Besides, my orders are to get you to the Mallt-y-Nos safely. If there’s a ship like that out there, I can’t let you leave.”

“Then we are your prisoners,” Ivan said.

“If that’s what it takes.”

“This won’t be the only ship we find like this,” Ivan warned, the message from the Huldren ringing in his head. “There will be others.”

“Then we’ll deal with them when we find them.” Shara turned her head away. “What’s the status of our rescue shuttle?”

Ivan could have warned her, could have given that prey animal fear a name. But there was nothing he could say without endangering himself or Mattie: he did not imagine Shara Court would be pleased that they’d had a hand in the creation of the mechanical sentience that was wandering the cosmos, or that she would be happy to know that it was apparently out of control.

It was a good thing Mattie had wiped the message before anyone else on the Macha could see it. Even though Ivan had seen it only once, every word of it was burned into his mind.

The message had said, IVAN, PLEASE HELP ME.

It had been signed ALTHEA BASTET.

FORWARD

Sometime after the Macha came across the Huldren, Vithar received word that Constance Harper had left Mars for Venus. So Anji’s fleet changed course for Venus. Mattie didn’t mind that much for the very same reason, it seemed, that Ivan did.

“Venus is on the other side of the sun.” Visible from Mattie’s perspective only as a pair of boots and black-clad legs, Ivan was trying his hardest to do the impossible and wear a hole into the Copenhagen’s fireproof, airtight, missile-proof armored flooring.

“Yep,” Mattie said. Even though Mattie and Ivan weren’t allowed to leave the Macha, they spent their time inside the landed Copenhagen. Most of the repairs that they’d needed to do were done by now, but Mattie still wedged himself beneath the computer interface and checked for the thousandth time that he’d removed any possible System hardware the Ananke could use to get inside their computer.

“It’ll take us…”

“…a long fucking time,” Mattie finished. “What are you worrying about? Vithar’s news says she beat the System fleet.”

“Not in one battle,” Ivan said darkly, and continued his mission to erode a valley in the Copenhagen’s floor.

“I’m more worried about us surviving.”

“They can’t hurt us; they need us. All they can do is make us their prisoners.” Ivan sat down heavily in the captain’s chair.

Mattie stared at Ivan’s boots, his hands dangling between his knees. He said, knowing it was abrupt, “Tell me something.”

“Tell you what?”

“Anything. A story.”

Ivan’s fingers twitched: restless, patternless. “I haven’t got any stories to tell.”

“You’ve run out of things to say?”

“Well done. You’ve finally shut me up.”

The edge of the panel Mattie was working on dug metal beneath his nails. “I could teach you something,” Mattie offered, before he could think the better of it.

“How to be an insufferable roommate?”

“You’ve already got that covered.” Mattie slid himself out from beneath the panel. He went to the wall, spent a moment contemplating the cupboards—where had he put the things?—then remembered, stuck his head in, and after a moment of pushing aside lock picks and false papers produced a pair of handcuffs.

“…Why were those on your packing list?” Ivan asked.

“I always carry handcuffs,” Mattie said, pulling out a length of long wire as well, both tools of his trade. Something indescribable passed over Ivan’s face, so to shut down whatever might come out of his mouth next Mattie said, “They’re rigged cuffs, Ivan; I didn’t know if we’d need a Trojan prisoner to get you out of that fucking ship.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Mattie snapped one cuff over his own wrist and then knelt at Ivan’s side. The dangling cuff clanged against the pilot’s chair. “You know how to pick cuffs already,” Mattie said, and waited for Ivan’s nod.

When he’d gotten it, Mattie said, “But not when your hands are chained apart.”

Ivan’s left hand started drumming patternlessly again. He must have known he was doing it, Mattie thought, but couldn’t—or didn’t bother to with only Mattie here to see—stop. “I’m listening.”

“If you’ve got both hands there’re two things you can do,” said Mattie. “Slide a shim beneath the gears to loosen them up or get a pick and twist the mechanism inside.” He picked up the wire in his cuffed hand and held it, deliberately keeping his free hand behind his back. He rested his arm on the edge of Ivan’s chair. “If you’ve got one hand and a long enough pick, you can do the same thing.”

In a few quick moves, he bent the wire into the correct shape, then twisted his wrist as much as he could and angled the wire toward the cuffs. Cuffs were easy to pick; there was only one lever inside them, and so he managed to pop them open after a few minutes. The cuffs fell from his wrist; he just managed to catch them before they hit the ground.

Ivan said, “And if you don’t have a pick?”

Mattie clapped the cuffs around his wrist again. “If you don’t have a pick, you need a hard surface of some kind.” Like the armrest of a steel chair. Mattie kept his eyes fixed on his own wrist rather than look to see what Ivan’s expression might be. “You’ve got to angle your hand like this, see, so that the base of the thumb will hit right at the nub of bone. You want to angle a little inward, like this, so that the force goes in toward the palm. And then you need a short, fast blow—”

Ivan’s hand came down hard on his wrist, aborting his movement, pinning him to the chair.

“Do not dislocate your thumb,” he said.

“I’m showing—”

“I know,” Ivan said. He moved his hand without releasing the pressure on Mattie’s wrist to flick the rigged lock on the handcuffs so that it came off of Mattie’s arm again. “Thank you.”

Long days after their changed course to Venus, Anji’s fleet received new information, which was duly passed on to Ivan and Mattie: Constance Harper was on Mercury.

“She can’t have gone to both Venus and Mercury,” Ivan said. “There’s not enough time to travel between them, much less fight the System.”

Shara scowled. “Vithar, are you sure your reports are accurate?”

On the other side of the holographic table, visible over the white edge of the holographic sun, Vithar shrugged. “There’s fighting happening on Mercury. Is it the Mallt-y-Nos? That’s what I’m told.”

“But do you know?”

“There’s no way to know for sure,” Vithar said. “If you wanted confirmation, you could always send the Badh on ahead. Or the Copenhagen.”

There was an edge to his voice Mattie hadn’t expected. Ivan was eyeing Vithar as if he were reconsidering his use. Mattie swallowed down a surge of irrational annoyance.

Shara said, “Out of the question.”

“You sent me out yesterday to look for the Nemain.”

“And look at what you found!”

“The System ships are far from us.”

“Sorry,” said Mattie, “maybe I’m not keeping up. Did you just say we have System ships following us?”

“Following us, maybe,” Vithar said. “Behind us, certainly. There was no sign of the Nemain.”

Ivan said, “Could those be the same ships that followed us from Jupiter?”

“Possibly.”

“It doesn’t matter where they’re from. It’s my job to get what’s left of this fleet to the Huntress safely. None of us are separating.” Shara leaned over the table. The silver cloud of System ships on the map had dispersed, no longer representing a definite location but rather a possible area where the System fleet could be. Nearly half the inner solar system was filled with that quicksilver. Around three of the four inner planets, uncertain red ships had been marked: the possible locations of the Mallt-y-Nos’s fleet. Only Earth was black and barren of ships. Even the comet of Christoph’s approach out by Neptune was dispersing; their reports of his location were coming too infrequently to be certain where he was.

Mattie rolled an Old Earth coin through his knuckles and stared at the mess of uncertainties on the table before them.

“We have to pick a target,” Shara said. “This fleet stays together, all its parts. I say Mars: we knew the Huntress was there for certain weeks ago, and it’s closest to our location.”

“Venus,” Ivan said.

“Venus is on the other side of the sun!”

“No,” Mattie said, “Ivan’s right. We should go to Venus.”

Shara’s lips pressed, thin and strained. “Vithar?” she said.

Vithar was looking at Mattie and Ivan—no, just at Ivan—thoughtfully. Mattie pressed the old Earth coin hard with his nail until he felt the old metal bend.

Vithar said, “Ivan and Mattie have known the Huntress the longest.”

“Venus was next in the plan after Mars,” Ivan said. “Anji knows. Constance won’t be on Mercury, not yet. She’s on Venus.”

“Then we go to Venus,” said Shara.

“We’re going to lead those System ships right to Constance,” Ivan said after the meeting, following Mattie down the familiar path to the Macha’s docking bay. Ivan was still limping even after all this time. That leg of his, it seemed, would forever be a reminder that Mattie had been late.

Mattie would rather have talked about anything, anything, other than Constance Harper. “She’ll be fine. She’s got good people around her.”

“Like Anji?”

“What do you care?”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because I think what might happen to us is a little more disturbing!” Mattie hissed.

“You—”

“No,” Mattie said flatly, and if the subject wasn’t dropped, at least for the moment Ivan stopped pushing it.

Vithar had hedged, but those System ships could easily be the ones from Jupiter. If they were, they’d destroyed the Nemain and were determined enough to follow the Macha and the Badh into the darkness of interstellar space.

If Mattie and Ivan could get into the Copenhagen, they could outrun those ships. Mattie had that thought ringing through his head when an alarm went off in the Macha a few hours later.

Shara was already in the control room when Mattie and Ivan arrived, standing beneath the half dome of uninterrupted sky. Ahead of them, like a fine mist, something winked and flashed between the stars.

“Can we divert course?” she asked.

“We’re close enough to be seen by their sensors,” one of the revolutionaries reported.

“Why didn’t we see them before?”

“We did,” the same man said. “But there’s no voluntary motion. They’re cold. We thought it was…debris from a collision, maybe.”

“What is it?” Mattie asked.

“Ships of some kind,” Shara said. She was leaning tensely forward, her hands wringing together. She’d been doing that more and more often lately. “A lot of them.”

A lot indeed. They filled up almost the entire viewscreen, drifting, as densely packed as the stones in a planetary ring.

Drifting and cold, just like the Huldren.

From beside Mattie, with calm and eerie certainty, Ivan said, “They’re dead.”

Silence fell among the revolutionaries, underlaid by the low, relentless hum of functioning electronics. Shara broke it. “Is there any sign of heat or life support among those ships?”

“Negative,” one of the revolutionaries reported.

Mattie said, “We should get out of here.”

“Check the computers,” Shara told him. “Like you did before.”

“What if—whatever did this to them is still here? We should leave.”

The radio buzzed, and Vithar’s voice came over through the static. “Macha, can you count the ships? The Badh can’t get a definite number.”

“Count them,” Shara ordered her people.

Ivan was already on the lower level, trying to get into the other ships’ computers. Mattie joined him reluctantly and took over the endeavor. He understood immediately why the Badh hadn’t been able to get a definite count. There were an impossible number of ships out there. Mattie chose one—the nearest—and got to work.

It was easier to access these ships than it had been to get into the Huldren. When Mattie saw why, his alarm grew. “These are System ships.”

“Dead?” Shara asked.

If there was even one ship out there still alive, it would attack Anji’s ships—and probably defeat them. The ship’s computer Mattie was burrowing through was from a System warship, overpowered, deadly. “I hope so.”

“Look,” said Ivan suddenly, and his finger fell on the screen in front of Mattie, underlining a single piece of code:

R = ae^bθ

One of the Macha revolutionaries said, “The computer can’t keep a count—there are too many of them.”

“What does that mean?” Shara asked. “A hundred? A thousand?”

“More than a thousand,” the revolutionary said.

More than a thousand System warships. Mattie stared up at the sparking debris field on the viewscreen, the vast, incomprehensible amount of firepower floating dead in space ahead of them. He had never seen so many ships in his life. This must have been what the people of Saturn had seen in the days before the end, a glittering cloud of ships coming down on them, making new constellations as they approached, eerie but peaceful—until the bombs started to drop.

There was only one thing this many System warships could be, and Ivan must have realized it, too, probably before Mattie had. While Mattie sat silent and numb with horror, he said to Shara, “This is the System fleet.”

“That’s impossible,” Shara said. When no one agreed, she asked, “Could the Mallt-y-Nos have done this?”

“No,” Mattie said. “No, she couldn’t.”

“The spiral ship did this,” Ivan said.

“How do you know—”

“The same thing’s been done to these computers as happened to the Huldren. Get Grace to look at them if you like. She’ll recognize it.”

“All of them?” Shara repeated. “All of those ships?”

The entire System fleet. The Ananke had destroyed it with a thought.

They had to get out of there.

“Do you remember my offer?” Ivan said.

Shara was still staring out at the impossible destruction ahead of them. “I can’t let you go.”

“Then we’ll compromise,” Ivan said. “Let us fly our own ship, but we promise not to leave. The Badh can fly out with us as insurance. The Copenhagen can’t outrun or outfight the Badh. I’m not asking you to let us go. I’m just asking you to let us have our ship. In return, we’ll protect yours.”

It was a lie, Mattie could have told her—just about everything Ivan said was a lie. But this lie at least was in Mattie’s favor.

Shara said, “Do it.”

FORWARD

“I’m not going to tell them how we know,” Ivan snapped.

Mattie was digging through the cabinets on the Copenhagen for whatever equipment he’d packed. Ivan watched him shove the contents of one cabinet to the ground, then slam the door shut a moment later, empty-handed. “Why are we telling them anything?”

With effort, Ivan kept his exasperation from his tone. “We might be saving their lives.”

Mattie had moved to the next cabinet and was tearing that one apart, too, his motion jerky with frustration. “We should get on the Copenhagen and go.”

“We can’t get on the Copenhagen and go until after we’ve fixed their ships. They won’t let us. And even if we could run away now, we’d have to fix their computers before we left. We made Ananke what she is, we—”

“We had nothing to do with making the Ananke,” Mattie snapped. “And watch what you say to them. You’re already half System in their eyes, half one of Constance’s dogs. You want to end up in a cell again or with another gun to your head?”

“We had everything to do with Ananke.”

Mattie made a sound of frustration. A moment later he emerged from the cabinet with a small bag of tools: the System backdoors that Ananke took advantage of often could be closed only by altering actual hardware. “I have only one set.”

“Vithar will have something on his ship I can use.”

“We’re going to work together.”

“We’ll cover more ground if we split up,” Ivan said. “You work on the Macha; I’ll fix the Badh.”

“We should work together.”

“There’s not enough room for two people to work on the Badh. And I have a better chance of persuading Vithar to let us go if I can get him alone.”

“To do what?” Mattie snapped.

“Talk.” Ivan found that his voice had risen to match Mattie’s. He tried to lower it, but some senseless agitation was making him defensive. “We don’t want to gang up on him.”

Mattie slammed the cabinet door shut. “Fine. You’ve made the decision; let’s go.”

“I’ll meet you back here.”

“Sure,” said Mattie, and was gone.

Ivan stood in the Copenhagen alone, unsettled, angry, and ashamed. He could put no reason to any of the emotions: every time he approached a cause, it slipped away from him like some silvery fish. Mattie was unsettled by the nearness of Ananke, Ivan told himself; they both were.

It did not ring entirely true.

Vithar was waiting for Ivan out in the docking bay, leaning against the hull of the Badh. “Shara says you’re going to defend my computer against the spiral ship.”

“I’m very helpful.”

To Ivan’s surprise, Vithar chuckled. He turned back to the Badh and tapped in the unlock code. Ivan tried to read it from the motions of his arm—once the Copenhagen was out in open space, the only thing stopping him and Mattie from escaping was the Badh. But Vithar’s broad shoulders effectively blocked Ivan’s view.

The Badh turned out to be nearly all engine. The cabin was not much larger than an escape pod would be, but even so, with the door opened there was just enough room for Ivan to get at the computer and Vithar to crouch in the cabin behind him.

Ivan started the computer without starting up the engines and eyed the inside of the cabin. You could tell a lot about a person from the inside of his or her ship. Vithar had a scrap of fabric tied to one of the maneuverability controls, red, ragged. No saying what it was a memento of. There was a knife under the control panel, a gun concealed to Ivan’s right, and two more knives—all of different shapes, all looking exceptionally well cared for—above Ivan’s head.

“There’s one in the back of the seat, too,” Vithar said.

“Very nice,” Ivan said as the computer woke and requested input. “Your collection?”

“Things I’ve picked up here and there.”

“It’s good to have a hobby,” Ivan said, and did a brief check of the most obvious System backdoors. All sealed: well done.

“Explain what you’re doing to me,” Vithar said.

“I’m sealing the System backdoors into your computers.”

“I thought I’d already done that.”

“The System left multiple redundancies. Most of them have been forgotten. Some of them don’t exist on all machines.”

“But you know about them.”

Ivan smiled. “Mattie and I made it a professional priority.”

“I see.” Ivan could feel Vithar watching him from over the edge of the chair. “And is there a backdoor in the engine controls?”

“Sometimes,” Ivan said. “But apparently not this time.” He backed out of the systems that controlled the Badh’s top speed. “Mattie is working on the Macha right now. The Copenhagen is already secure.”

“And how do you know that this will stop the spiral ship?”

Ivan frowned down at the computer display, as if that was what was taking up most of his attention. “I saw how she accessed the Huldren and the System fleet.”

Silence. Vithar seemed to know enough about computers to be able to tell if Ivan was sabotaging his, so Ivan moved carefully, aware of Vithar’s attention on his back.

Vithar said, “What do you know about the spiral ship?”

Most of the backdoors Ivan was going to seal had been shut already. And most of the sensitive areas Ivan tried to edge into—like engine control and navigation—were well defended against any kind of sabotage.

Much as this ship itself was well defended, with weapons wedged into every corner.

Like the teeth of gears interlocking, catching with a mechanical jolt, Ivan’s memories of where he had met Vithar before slotted into place.

Ivan said, “Strange for a diplomat to travel alone.”

“I’m traveling with the Macha.”

“But the Macha aren’t your people; they’re Shara’s. Why did Anji send you?”

“I’m her diplomat.”

“Are you? Mattie and I met you on Puck. One of Constance’s contacts had started to leak information. She sent me and Mattie, we figured out who it was, and then we did as she ordered and we gave the name to you.”

Ivan should have understood the true nature of Anji’s “diplomatic” mission the moment he realized it consisted of two warships and a troop carrier at full capacity.

“The next I heard,” Ivan said, “that man was found dead on the ice outside the greenhouse enclosure.”

Vithar said, “The past is the past.”

“It still affects the present. Your computer is all set.” Ivan smiled pleasantly at him. “May I leave?”

Vithar moved aside. Ivan carefully stepped out past him, never once turning his back. “I’ll be seeing you,” Ivan said, and wished that he had been able to at least sabotage the Badh’s weaponry systems while he had been inside.

He should have realized it before. If all Anji had wanted was to speak to Constance, she could have broadcast a message to her. Instead, she’d insisted on sending some of her own people. And she’d wanted Ivan and Mattie to take Vithar directly to Constance.

Ivan already had brought enough destruction to Constance and those in her orbit. Whatever happened, he could not let Anji’s assassin reach Constance or her fleet.

BACKWARD

The Annwn landed on Mars in a cloud of red dust and a sonic boom. The sound was inaudible through the ship’s hull, but the vibrations were not, and so Ivan knew that the sound of their landing had echoed through the atmosphere, ringing out over the edge of the scarp and into the valley below.

In the moments after the Annwn had landed, just long enough for the ship’s systems to settle into quiescence, for the heat of its landing to dissipate into a safe range, the hull door opened and then shut again with a bang.

Mattie glanced at Ivan, but Ivan didn’t stay to meet his look, rising from his chair in the piloting room to let himself down the sideways hall in a controlled fall, reaching the hull door seconds after Constance had slammed it shut.

The air outside was still hot from the Annwn’s rapid descent. Ivan had to squint through the heat warping and the settling dust to see her, Constance Harper, walking across the scarp toward the shadowed height of her bar. She shrugged her shawl up farther over her freckled shoulders and brought the edge of it to cover her nose as she walked away from him.

He stepped out onto the Martian stone and set off after her. She must have heard him coming, but did not stop.

“Constance,” he said when he was near, but she ignored him. He stopped a moment, shut his eyes, took a swift breath. Don’t push her, he told himself. Be calm. Be clever.

He started off after her again at a brisk walk now, not a run.

“I’m sorry about what I said,” he said when he had come near again, and grabbed her arm this time so that she could not ignore him. Constance tugged her arm from his grip immediately, but she did stop to face him, her hazel eyes blazing over the edge of her fringed shawl.

A gust of wind blew the settling dust around them, between them. Ivan had come out without scarf or coat; the dust pricked his skin, dried his mouth, tickled his throat. The Martian air was chill and thin. He showed none of this, not to her.

“I was too harsh,” he said with as much bared sincerity as he could show. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” Constance said. “You meant every word.”

But he was sorry this time. The things he had said while they had flown away from Luna after delivering the Terran Class 1 bombs to Julian had been more than he had meant to say, and he had said them more harshly. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, punish her, or push her away. He simply needed her to listen.

“I can mean every word and still be sorry,” Ivan said, but she only turned her head aside, and he could see the sharpness of her furious jaw when the wind blew her shawl against the edged shape of it.

She moved to leave.

His hand darted out before he had decided to grab her; he found himself face to face with her from extraordinarily close, his hand digging into the thin fabric that covered her upper arm. The nearness of her, the ferocity of her unyielding regard, once would have excited him. But now he could only look at her blazing eyes and fear.

“If the idea of becoming like the System doesn’t frighten you,” Ivan said to the air and the shawl that separated her mouth from his, “then think about what will happen after the war begins.”

“Justice,” Constance said. “War is the whole idea, Ivan—”

He shook her. He didn’t mean to do it, but he did, and that frightened him as deeply as she did. He was on a precipice as high and deadly as the scarp they stood beside, and Constance had the power to push him off. “Everyone will be trying to kill you, Constance.”

She laughed at him, releasing her shawl to the wind. It was the way a goddess might laugh, sure and joyless, a terrible sound from a harpy mouth.

“Then think about me,” Ivan said, because if he had to, he would cover himself in dirt to pull her aside. “I’m with you; they’ll be trying to kill me—” He changed tack again in the face of her blazing contempt. “And they’ll be trying to kill Mattie.” That was a real horror: Matthew Gale bloodied and dead and Constance stepping past his fallen corpse without a downward glance. Ivan could see it so clearly, the total loss of everyone he had ever loved. “They’ll kill Mattie—”

“You don’t even know how to talk to me without trying to manipulate me, do you?” she said, and silenced him.

She looked at him a moment longer, that long and dire goddess glance, and then she pulled her arm from his hand again and strode off across the scarp, catching the edge of her shawl between her snaring fingers.

“Constance!” he called, because he would tell her the truth now if she wanted it: that he had loved her after a fashion, no matter what she thought; that he would love her again, if she so wished it; that he would love her better now rather than face this terrible failure again, because he had failed her, he had led her to this, and now he could not stop her from going headlong into it and becoming something she should not be, something terrible and cruel.

But she did not turn this time, and this time Ivan did not have the courage to go to her and grab her arm.

He watched her enter her bar alone and stood in the sand that was settling slowly after her passage. Mattie was waiting for him at the door to the Annwn, watching the exchange with furrowed brow.

He would try again, Ivan told himself. Anyone can be convinced of anything if you found the right point to apply pressure. Anyone could be controlled. He wouldn’t let Constance fall off the edge of the cliff he had brought her to. He would find her, and he would save her, before it was too late.

FORWARD

“We need an alternative method of getting information.” Shara’s voice came hazily through the Copenhagen’s radio.

Mattie jiggled his leg restlessly beneath the computer panels. The call had come through when he had been piloting their ship—newly freed—and Ivan had refused the offer of the chair.

“What kind of alternative method?” Ivan asked Shara.

Vithar’s voice hummed through from the Badh. “The communications relays are all down.”

On the viewscreen, Mattie could see the Badh darting around not far from the Copenhagen. He wished Ivan had managed to sabotage the other ship when he’d been in the computer.

The Badh was a one-person ship. Shara made them redock on the Macha whenever Vithar needed to sleep. Maybe Mattie could find some way to use that to their advantage.

“Not only do we need information,” Vithar was saying, oblivious to Mattie’s hard math, “we need to warn Anji about the spiral ship.”

The mention of the Ananke was enough to draw Mattie’s shoulders up tight with tension. “Without the relays, you’ve got fuck-all chance of getting a message out to Saturn.”

“That’s why I asked for an alternative,” Shara snapped.

“System relay stations,” Ivan said. “If we can get to an actual relay station and it’s not a pile of smoking rubble, we can gain access to what’s left of the network.”

“How much is left of the network?” Shara asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know where any are?”

“There’s one pretty close,” Mattie said. “They’ve got a few in the asteroid belt. I can send you the coordinates.”

“Do it,” Shara said.

“When we get there,” Ivan said, “the System computers will be protected against non-System use. You’ll have to let Mattie and me go down there.”

“Vithar will go with you,” Shara said, and cut the connection.

But the relay station, when they found it, was blackened and broken. Mattie went down with Ivan anyway, docking into the part of the station that was still mostly intact. Inside, they had to pick their way over rubble, Vithar at their heels.

The computers were in as bad condition as the rest of the station. Mattie checked them quickly. “Nothing’s working but the internal systems. Ventilation and cameras.” Typical of the System to make sure the cameras still would work even in the event of an otherwise total shutdown.

Vithar had brought a handheld communicator. Stepping carefully over crumbled concrete, he activated it. “Shara, this place is dead.”

The communicator buzzed with incoming transmission. “Are there any other stations nearby?”

Ivan had been staring at the dead communications equipment in silence. There was no expression on his face, but Mattie had the uneasy feeling that he was planning something. “There’s one by Earth,” Ivan said. Mattie shot him a glare he didn’t receive.

Shara’s voice came through thinly, as if she were speaking through her teeth. “Earth is too far away. We are not going to Earth. And I am not sending the Badh or the Copenhagen on ahead.”

Mattie said, “There’s one just outside the asteroid belt, by Jupiter. We can get to that one fast, and there’ll be no one there.”

It was Ivan’s turn to give Mattie a look that Mattie resolutely ignored.

“That’s a long trip,” Shara said.

“We have to make it,” Vithar said. “Anji needs to know how to block a computer against the…virus or whatever killed the fleet. Afterward, we find the Mallt-y-Nos.”

“While we’re at it, we can confirm what she wants us to do about Christoph,” Shara said pointedly. “Mattie, when you’re back on the Copenhagen, send the Badh and the Macha the coordinates.”

“Will do,” Mattie said.

They reached the other relay station a few days later. It was the only habitable place on the asteroid, a rock so small that it had no name, drifting frozen and alone and nameless in empty space. Its solitude had saved it: there were no marks of bombs on its walls, and its greenhouse was intact.

Mattie brought the Copenhagen down to dock smoothly, then joined Ivan out in the docking area. Other than the docking area, Mattie could see only a few other rooms: one for access to the communications equipment and System database and a passageway that led to a few smaller rooms for living and sleeping spaces. Each room could be sealed off from the others in case of a catastrophic loss of atmosphere, but none of the air lock doors had been shut. The inhabitants of this rock had fled. Maybe they’d been scared off by the attack on the other station.

Ivan headed off for the interior rooms while Mattie was still sealing the Copenhagen and Vithar was just unfurling himself from the Badh. Mattie gritted his teeth, rushed through the rest of the sealing process, and jogged off after him. Just because the place looked abandoned didn’t mean there wasn’t some loyal System bastard hiding in a closet farther in.

Mattie caught up to Ivan just as he turned to look at a computer panel set into the wall beside the first interior air lock doors.

Some great mechanical force groaned and grinded. Mattie ducked automatically, shoving Ivan back with his shoulder, his gun out, looking wildly around for the danger. Overhead, the thick air lock doors had started to close.

Vithar looked up from the Badh and saw the doors shutting. He started forward, but he was too far to make it before the doors met and sealed.

In the resounding silence after the doors had shut, Mattie said, “Did you just kill him?”

“Of course not.” Ivan was calmly inputting a code to keep the door from being opened by any overrides from the other side. “There’s plenty of air in there. We’ll even have to let him out in an hour or so to get back to our ship.”

Mattie’s temper broke. “It would have been nice if you’d let me know what we were doing before you did it, Ivan!”

“I thought we were on the same page.”

“We’re not even reading the same fucking book,” Mattie snapped. “Wait here a minute, all right?”

When the System cameras shattered under the force of his bullets one by one, Mattie felt a little bit better. He returned to Ivan. “Want to tell me what’s the next stage of your plan?”

“We’ll warn Anji about Ananke, as we said. But we also find Constance—where she is, how to get to her—and warn her about Anji.”

“Then what?”

Ivan shrugged. “Then we go back to our ship.”

“We’ll have just sabotaged Anji’s people. You don’t think they might take that out on us?”

“Would you rather we let them kill Constance?”

“I’d rather we got out of here alive!”

“Then what do you think we should do?” Ivan said.

It wasn’t like Ivan had left them a lot of choices. “Overpower Vithar when we come out, fly out, and get away.”

Ivan was watching him in dark and steady silence. “Are you willing to kill him?”

“If we have to,” Mattie snapped.

The distance between them seemed to lengthen like space being warped by a black hole. There was an argument glinting in Ivan’s eyes, one of those wild shouting arguments he’d had with Constance.

Mattie turned away. “Computers are in here,” he said, jerking his gun in their direction.

Ivan said, “I’ll check the database for any reports on where Constance might be. You try to get into contact with…anyone.”

Whatever argument they just hadn’t had, Mattie realized, he had lost.

The relay station was made mostly of reinforced greenhouse glass. Before the cameras had been shot out, all that glass would have guaranteed that there were no dead spots in the footage. Even with the cameras shot out, Mattie felt exposed. He found the communications station beside where Ivan was frowning down at the database of past communications and took the time to reprogram the computer so that any messages sent out from this station would not carry the mark of their location.

“Any luck?” he asked Ivan. The silence after such a near argument was making Mattie nervous.

“Not much.” Ivan seemed unaffected. “The database is full of dead ends and lost connections. When the data centers on Earth were destroyed, it left holes in the records.”

Constance’s war had scarred even the virtual realm. Mattie shook his head and sent off the symbol of the Mallt-y-Nos, barking hounds, looking for an answer.

A click from the computer nearby, and then a familiar voice spoke. “People of the System.”

Mattie jerked. “Turn that off.”

“I haven’t seen it before,” Ivan said quietly. His gaze was fixed on the screen, where Constance Harper, with a blazing look, declared the System destroyed.

Mattie had been behind the camera. Not that long ago, and a lifetime since. A surge of resentment rose up in him. “Turn it off.”

Ivan’s hand lifted as if he would deny Mattie or reach out to touch Constance’s face, but instead he stopped the video and closed it. A minute later, old recorded messages once again were scrolling rapidly across the screen.

Beneath Mattie’s hands, the howling of hounds played, the answer to his call. Mattie got on the microphone. “This is Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov. Who are we talking to?”

The response took a long time in coming. Whoever they were talking to was several light-minutes away—by Jupiter, maybe.

A woman’s voice, warped and warbled, came on. Mattie’s fingers tightened around the edge of the control panel until he realized that the speaker was a woman he did not know.

“This is the diplomatic fleet of Julian Keys in support of the Mallt-y-Nos,” she said. “Please repeat your identity.”

“Mattie Gale and Leontios Ivanov,” Mattie said for the second time.

Ivan was up and at his shoulder. “Julian?”

There was a chair by Mattie’s hip. He kicked it out for Ivan to use. “Yep.”

They waited. At some point while waiting, Ivan decided to sit down. Mattie did not let on that he had noticed.

The woman’s voice spoke again. “Please confirm your identities.”

Mattie scowled. He reached up and flicked a switch, and the camera above the communications terminal lit up, displaying the two of them on half of the screen, with black beside them.

“Is that good enough?” Mattie asked, and saw the corners of Ivan’s mouth twitch.

The silence this time was rather longer, though perhaps it just seemed longer because the camera was on them and recording. At long last, the screen split in two, and a man appeared: older, dark skinned, with the stillness to his face and precision to his movements that spoke of an upbringing on Terra.

“Julian,” Ivan said, and smiled.

That impassiveness was broken by pleasure. “Leon,” Julian said, and then, “Mattie. It’s good to see you.”

Mattie hardly knew Julian—he’d met him only once, really, when handing off the seven bombs that eventually would destroy Earth—but Ivan had known him since childhood, one of Milla Ivanov’s few surviving revolutionary friends. “You as well,” Ivan said.

Another lengthy pause as their words traveled to him and his traveled back across that impossible reach of space between them.

“We didn’t think you were alive,” Julian said.

“We’re pretty glad we’re breathing, too,” Mattie said.

“And mostly in one piece,” Ivan added. “We’ve been trying to get into contact with somebody—”

“But the solar system’s a mess,” Mattie interrupted, knowing that Ivan was trying to hurry the conversation along: with the delay in communication, pleasantries could take hours. Vithar probably would lose patience and blow open the air lock door with the Badh’s weaponry before then. “System everywhere and rebel ships that aren’t Con’s. People keep trying to shoot Ivan. And me sometimes.”

“Where is Constance, Julian?” Ivan asked.

This time, the delay the light took traveling between their little asteroid and Julian’s fleet was impossibly long. Absurdly, Mattie found himself hoping that the response would get trapped like light frozen at the edge of a black hole and the answer would never return. But at last Julian said, “On Venus, but not for much longer.”

There was some distance to Venus, at least. They would have some time.

“She’s sticking to the plan—Mars, Venus, Mercury, Luna. But communication has been difficult. If she changes her plan, I won’t know.”

It had been abstract before, Mattie realized, knowing where Constance was. But now they knew for sure. There was a real place they might go. There was a real danger.

Ivan seemed relieved. “Luna,” he said. “Thank you.”

“What about everyone else?” Mattie asked abruptly. “We saw Anji, but what about Christoph?” He could still see all those fleets converging on one place on the Macha’s map.

“My mother?” Ivan asked quietly. “Is she with Con?”

“If you saw Anji, I’m glad you’re alive,” Julian said. “I think Anji will kill any one of us if she’s pressed.”

Ivan didn’t move, but Mattie felt the “I told you so” anyway.

“I spoke to Milla not long ago; she’s alive and safe, with the Mallt-y-Nos. Christoph—”

Julian stopped, arrested, and that moment of silence was more telling than anything he could have said. “Christoph is dead,” he said at last, precisely.

Christoph is dead. Mattie had grown used to understanding the unspoken words from a Terran mouth, and Julian’s words, he knew, meant Christoph is dead, and I killed him.

I told you she could take care of herself, Mattie thought at Ivan, not without bitterness. He did not believe that Ivan heard.

Julian said, “Come join me and my fleet. It’s dangerous in the solar system now, and there’s safety in numbers.”

“No, thank you,” Ivan said. “We’ll meet Constance on Luna.”

“My fleet is heading to rejoin Constance, too.”

“No, thank you,” Ivan said firmly, and without once asking Mattie what he thought.

Julian tried once more. “It will be safer with my fleet.”

“It will be faster if we go alone,” Ivan pointed out. “She needs us there, Julian.”

Julian frowned. “Do what you must,” he said, “but—what is it?”

He was addressing someone out of frame. Mattie could just make out her response:

“Julian,” said the same unseen woman who had pressed him for his identity, “someone’s tapped into this transmission. They’re listening in. There’s an unidentified ship out on the edges of our sensors; it looks like it might be System.”

Mattie’s fingers tightened slowly around the back of Ivan’s chair, blood fleeing from them with the pressure until he could not feel anything from their flesh, only their bones bending, taut, creaking like unoiled metal.

The transmission from Julian’s end had been recorded in the past: a few minutes ago now. What Mattie and Ivan were witnessing had already been done.

“Julian, wait,” Ivan said sharply, uselessly.

“I apologize,” Julian said, already too late, addressing them once more from the past, a faint frown marking the edges of his eyes. “I will make contact with you again as soon as this problem’s been dealt with.”

“Julian,” said Ivan, “Julian!” as the screen went suddenly black and threw them both into silence and the soft humming of dormant electronics.

“We have to call him back,” Ivan said. “What frequency did he call on?”

“No,” Mattie said.

“What do you mean no?”

“If we call him back, it could intercept the transmission.”

“We have to warn him!”

“No,” said Mattie.

The communications center chimed with an incoming call. Ivan reached for it.

“Wait!” Mattie said, and Ivan stopped.

Whoever was calling in had not used the signal of the hounds.

Together, they stared down at the communications terminal while it rang, a low, steady chime. The incoming transmission sound ceased abruptly, long enough to take a breath.

And then it started up again.

“We should answer,” Ivan said as the computer chimed with a patient and steady rhythm.

Mattie said, “Not until he gives the signal.”

The chiming ended. Then, for a third time, the communications gently rang.

Even if Julian somehow had forgotten to send the hounds signal on the first call, he would not forget on the second and certainly not the third.

Carefully skirting the buttons that would answer the call, Mattie checked the source. There was little to be seen. The call had come from a ship of System build—that didn’t mean anything; just about all ships currently flying had been System-built—but where the ship’s identification should have been, which said who it followed and where it was from and what it was called, there was a simple equation:

R = ae^bθ

“Mattie,” Ivan said with eerie calm, “I’m going to answer her.”

“No!” Mattie said, and Ivan let the call ring out into silence. This time the caller did not try again.

Mattie said, “We have to get out of here.” He straightened up and started for the sealed doors on the other end of the room, hastily scanning his memory for anything he might have set down and left behind. His gun was still in his waistband, so that was good.

Ivan was not with him. “We still have to warn Con and Anji.”

“Fuck them,” Mattie said. In front of the communications terminal Ivan’s shoulders squared with readiness for a fight. “We have to get out of here, now.”

At Ivan’s back, the communications began to ring.

For a moment, Mattie stared at Ivan and Ivan stared back. “Don’t,” Mattie said, starting forward, but Ivan already had turned around and opened the connection.

“Leontios Ivanov speaking,” he said into the microphone with his usual damned pleasantness, and Mattie sucked in his breath, his hand twitching automatically toward his gun.

But the response came far too fast to be from Jupiter. “Good,” said a man’s voice, Ganymedan-accented. Vithar. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“If you’re looking for an apology…”

“I’m calling with a warning,” Vithar said. “Those System ships have caught up.”

FORWARD

It seemed to take impossibly longer for the doors to the docks to unseal and open than the bare few seconds between when Ivan had entered a command into the door controls and Vithar had been shut out.

Vithar was waiting for them in the middle of the docking bay. Behind him the Badh was already powered up and vibrating with energy. “The Macha is holding them off, but it’s pinned down.”

“Those ships must have followed us from Jupiter to the dead System fleet,” Ivan said. Mattie already was entering the code to unlock the Copenhagen’s hull door. “They know the System fleet is destroyed, but they don’t know how.” And if they thought the Copenhagen and Anji’s ships were responsible, they wouldn’t stop attacking until they had destroyed or been destroyed.

“What is the Copenhagen’s weaponry?”

“Exterior? Fucking pitiful,” Mattie said.

Ivan could feel the heat from the Badh’s engines even from the door of the Copenhagen. “Can the Macha defeat them?”

“I don’t know. We need to get out there.”

“And do what?” Mattie demanded. The Copenhagen’s door hissed open.

“We’ll figure something out.”

“No,” Mattie said, “you’ll figure something out,” and then he was coming around the Copenhagen, gun out and aimed. Ivan nearly tried to stop him—Anji’s people were under attack; he and Mattie could escape later—but Mattie’s eyes widened, and there was a distinctive click from somewhere by Ivan’s ear.

Of course he would be fast on the draw. Vithar said, “Drop it.”

Mattie’s gun clattered to the floor. Ivan looked at him, looked at him hard, feeling as if there were some singular and crucial message he needed, in this moment, to pass on to Mattie Gale, but somehow the words for it would not come to his mind.

Mattie swallowed and looked away, and turned a glare onto Vithar, out of sight over Ivan’s shoulder. “Now what?” Mattie said. “You force us at gunpoint to go up there and get shot down?”

Behind Ivan’s ear, Vithar’s gun was uncocked. Ivan only heard it; he was facing Mattie, who was standing, tense, arms upraised and fingers twitching on the edge of a bad decision. Only when Mattie heaved out a breath did Ivan dare to turn around.

Vithar was tucking the gun back into his belt. “My orders,” he said, “were to broker an alliance with Constance Harper and to keep the two of you safe. Those were my only orders, Ivan.”

Ivan took a slow backward step away from Vithar, toward Mattie. He was rubbing his wrists unconsciously; when he realized what he was doing, he took a carefully even breath and let his hands fall back to his sides. Far overhead, visible through the glass of the relay station, something lit up like a far-off star in supernova.

Vithar said, “There’s no doubt those ships destroyed the Nemain. If the Copenhagen goes into battle, you’ll be killed.”

“You’re letting us go?” Mattie asked.

“I don’t have a choice. Anji is your friend whether you believe it or not. She made me a promise. I’m not what I was before the war. Now I fight in open battle if I have to, and if not, I’m a diplomat. I did not come to do any harm to Constance Harper.”

“Then why send you?” Ivan asked. “Why not just send a message to Constance?”

“Messages can be intercepted,” Vithar said. “The System is still out there. You’d better go.”

“Wait,” Ivan said.

“Ivan!” Mattie hissed.

Ivan spoke quickly. “What Anji started is only going to get worse—you saw it with Christoph. Whatever happens next, Anji is going to be in the thick of it. Even if Anji isn’t sending you out as an assassin now, one day she will.”

The heat from the Badh’s engines warped the air around Vithar so heavily that his expression was unreadable. He said, “We’ll meet up with you wherever Harper is. Keep your radio open for messages from us.”

Ivan let Mattie pull him into the Copenhagen’s cabin and seal the door. He started up the engines so that when Mattie came forward and nudged him out of the piloting chair, the ship was ready to follow the Badh into space.

The Badh went rocketing immediately toward the darting stars and distant explosions of the battle. Mattie turned the Copenhagen in the opposite direction and sped away as fast as the engines could bear.

“We never warned Anji about Ananke,” Ivan realized.

“Vithar’ll do it,” Mattie said.

The space battle was almost out of sight, but Ivan imagined he could still see the violence of it, the new stars being born and dying in explosion. “Where are we going?”

“Away.”

“We need a course and heading,” Ivan said. He began to pace slowly, stretching out his leg. “Julian said Constance is going to Luna soon.”

“We should find a place to lie low,” Mattie said. “If Julian knows where Constance is, then the Ananke would, too.”

“All the more reason for us to find her first.”

“You know, Ivan, if we’re dead, we can’t help Constance.”

“We can’t help Constance by running away, either,” Ivan said, and let the sharpness of his anger out into his voice. “She’s your sister, Mattie. What the hell did she do that makes you so willing to leave her to die?”

“I’ll put in a fucking course to Luna,” Mattie said.

“Leave the radio open, too. Just in case someone survives that mess.”

But the next message the Copenhagen received was not from the Nemain or the Badh. It was a public broadcast, sent throughout the entire solar system, bearing news of the Mallt-y-Nos.

It said that the Mallt-y-Nos was dead.

BACKWARD

Even stealing one bomb was feat enough, but Ivan realized soon that Constance didn’t intend to stop there.

The realization grew in his chest like frost spreading over a surface, like flame unleashing from the epicenter of an explosion. He and Mattie stole the Terran Class 1 bomb, and they brought it back to Mars, and then they hid it in a secret storage space beneath Constance’s bar. With every proud step she would tread upon potential energy enough to atomize her and everything around her. By the fact that they had stored the bomb, not planted it anywhere or detonated it immediately, Ivan knew that Constance intended for them to steal more bombs than just the first.

Now, Ivan thought, that was thinking big.

Ivan and Mattie had come in and greeted Constance before hiding the bomb away, and so when Ivan rentered the bar, she looked up unsurprised to see him. The System’s cameras were installed overhead, their eyes steadily watching. There were other people in the bar—Anji was there somewhere, probably, and Christoph, too; they were rarely far away—but Ivan felt their presence only as an extra set of eyes in addition to the System’s constant watch. And there was Constance behind the bar, with her dark eyes and her brown hair and the freckles on her shoulders visible even in the dim light, watching him come in with joyous triumph still written on her skin. Ivan wondered how the System couldn’t read it.

When he was near enough, he grabbed her and kissed her as hard as he could.

She kissed him back, strength in the grip of her fingers as they closed around the nape of his neck.

Behind Ivan, someone whooped. Anji, he noted distractedly, because not even Constance could make him forget when he was watched and by whom, but his thoughts of Anji were driven from his mind by the way Constance’s nails dug into his skin.

She pulled away, or pushed him away, and held him a short distance from her. “Come on,” she said with command in her low voice, and someone else in the bar laughed the laugh of an uncomfortable voyeur.

In the kitchen Constance turned to him, and he caught her as she came toward him, pulling her in until his back hit the door they had just closed, making it bang against the door frame. She pressed her nose to his, their lips almost touching, as if she were thinking of nothing but that touch, but she was listening to him quite closely. He whispered into her hair, “It’s beneath your house.”

She smiled. Ivan felt the upward curve of the muscles with his own lips. He pulled away from her to press a kiss to her cheek and continued, “You’re not going to stop there, are you?”

“Of course not,” Constance murmured, brushing her nose against his cheek, her lips against his jaw—low, so the System couldn’t see.

“How many?”

Constance tugged at his shirt, undoing the buttons. “I like the number ten,” she said. The look she gave him was raw and dangerous.

“Seven,” Ivan said. “Not ten.”

“Why seven?” Constance asked, and bent in to kiss him.

“Because that’s the average number the System loses every year,” Ivan told her, whispered between strands of her hair when they embraced. “If they lose seven, they won’t realize right away that something’s wrong.”

He ran his hand down her cheek, and from a powerful urge to see that feral light in her eyes again, he added, “And seven is one for every continent.”

The clutch of her fingers was fierce approval. It felt right. Like this, his will was an extension of hers, his thoughts her thoughts: everything was controlled. When she took his hand and drew him away from the door, deeper into the kitchen toward the staircase that led to the bedrooms upstairs, Ivan let himself be led.

At Constance’s bedroom she kissed him again, and Ivan thought of nothing but Constance, the taste of her, the perfection of the skin on her neck, the divinity in the bend of her collarbone.

When she pushed him down on the bed while she began to strip off her shirt, Ivan saw triumph in her eyes, shining bright and glorious.

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her down and off balance so that she landed atop him, catching herself on her elbows on the bed. He said, “What are you going to do with them?”

Constance’s voice got deep and low and rough and private: “I’m going to plant them on Earth.”

“Now you’re thinking big,” he said into her ear. His hands could span her skull, but when they did, they got tangled in her hair. “Now you’re thinking right.”

His next indrawn breath came from her lungs. She pulled away only to take off her bra and toss it casually in the direction of the System camera, partially obscuring its view. Then she bent over him with that triumph still in her gaze, and the freckles on her shoulders spread down as far as her breasts.

He caught her wrists. “How?” he asked.

“Carefully,” Constance said, and broke free of his grip to bend back down over him, but Ivan flipped her in the heartbeat of time when she was off balance, forcing her onto her back on the bed and pinning her down.

“How?” he said, keeping his voice as soft as he knew how.

Constance was breathing hard. “While you’re up, take off your shirt,” she told him, and Ivan slid his unbuttoned shirt off his shoulders. She watched him and reached up her arms to the back of her head and began to undo her braid.

Ivan leaned in to her ear. Her hands were already up over her head as if she were in surrender. He whispered, “How?”

“We’ll figure it out,” said Constance, “you and I.”

“Not good enough. How?”

Constance sat up very suddenly. He let her. He had not really been holding her down at all, he knew, if she could sit up at will. Her hair was loose and she was dangerous and powerful and beautiful, and when she touched his cheek, her fingertips burned like sparks against his skin.

Constance said, “Together.”

He was the one who kissed her then, and he almost didn’t think of the System when he did it. She kissed him back as if the kiss were a part of her war, and somehow he ended up beneath her again.

“First,” Constance said, “we smuggle the bombs to Earth.”

Ivan threaded his fingers through her hair. “How?”

She was never frightened. Even though she was vulnerable and he held her, even though the System was watching, Ivan saw only calculation in her eyes, the movement of troops like wolves spreading out to take down a stag.

“We’ll smuggle the bombs to Luna first,” Constance said. “Then switch ships on Luna—”

“Not one ship,” Ivan said. “Many.”

“Many,” Constance echoed, “so that if one is compromised—”

“—the rest will still make it to the planet.”

She shifted above him, her fingers gripping the fabric of sheets on either side of Ivan’s head as if she would like to tear through it. “We need ships that the System wouldn’t scrutinize—”

“System maintenance craft,” Ivan said. “They’re everywhere around Terra.”

She kissed him again. Perhaps it was genuine. Perhaps it had been too long since they had kissed, and the System was watching. “So we need seven false System maintenance craft,” she said.

“No,” Ivan said, “real ones. We just need a few people on board working for us; the rest of the crew doesn’t need to know what they’re carrying.”

Constance laughed. Ivan’s heart pounded in rhythm with her laughter. “We don’t even need more than one,” she said, and even in her satisfaction she kept her voice low. “We load all seven onto one maintenance craft. Then we stage breakdowns—”

“—of other ships in the range of our compromised maintenance craft,” Ivan said, her words coming out of him. “That way the bombs are being added to their cargo holds outside of customs—”

“And the System won’t check for them. The same bombs. The same bombs they let off on Saturn, and we’ll set them off on Earth.”

Her hair brushed over his skin. Ivan looked up at her and felt it, the same thing he’d felt when he’d been bleeding out of his wrists: the submission to an inevitable end, the slow loss of his self.

The same bombs as on Saturn—

“We need a contact,” Constance whispered. Her hand was cradling his head. His hand was tracing down the curve of her spine. “On Earth.”

Corpses floated through Saturn’s rings, a billion frozen corpses, casualties of the System’s bombs.

“Julian,” Ivan said through his strange and clouding unease. “My mother’s friend. Julian.”

When she leaned up and away from him, he saw a look on her face like joy. She tilted her head back, and he stared at the soft skin of her throat while she turned that triumph on the ceiling like a challenge to God. The System would fall, he knew, and in that moment he shared her certainty down to his very bones, because if he was her now, he had to feel the same things she did. He was her, he was hers, and in being her and hers and not himself and his own, he was finally free, finally at peace, and—

Nine billion people to die on Terra.

The thought crashed down on him like a wave of ice water. Constance was looking at him again, still with that smile on her face. He’d come in here to help her plan better, because if she planned better, he would stay alive, and she would stay alive, and Mattie would—had he? He’d come in here, and he’d helped her plan, and why had he done it?

Later, when Constance was curled up next to him, there was peace in her face that he did not share. Even with the heat of her so close, Ivan felt cold.

Nine billion people.

Their conversation ran through his head like fire over flesh, leaving open weeping sores behind.

It was not Constance who had done this, Ivan knew. It was Constance who would pull the trigger, but it was he who had built the gun, loaded it, and laid it in her hands. He knew how many would die when she pulled that trigger, and he knew what Constance would lose in the firing.

Nine billion people and one Constance Harper. Dead like all those people in Saturn’s rings.

And Ivan had killed them all.

FORWARD

“It’s just a rumor,” Mattie said to him while the Copenhagen flew at its highest speed toward the red planet. There was no arguing with such deliberate blindness, and so Ivan did not, but when he closed his eyes, he saw Constance dead, throat slit, blood covering her neck like a scarf.

It was not Mattie’s fault she was dead; he had been dragging his heels on finding her, but it still wasn’t his fault. It was Ivan’s fault, as sure as the sun had risen every morning on Earth. It was not Mattie’s fault, Ivan knew, but he knew that Mattie felt the blame even so.

The trip was impossibly fast with the Copenhagen’s relativistic drive but not fast enough. If Constance had been killed, that had been days ago now; her body would be rotting on the soil.

“Ivan,” Mattie said as they neared the planet, “there’s a lot of radiation.”

Of course there was. Where Constance trod, atoms split themselves. If she had died, the ensuing explosion surely would have scorched the soil. “There’s a war on.”

“There’s a lot of radiation,” Mattie said with a queer note, and at last Ivan came over to see what he saw.

Ash in the atmosphere, radiation raining down. Ivan had a strange surreal moment in which he wondered if this was the trace of her death that he was seeing, if she had indeed gone up like a supernova on the planet’s surface.

No. He shook his head from the dreamy irrationality, from the distant ringing echo of heels on a white floor. “That’s a Terran Class 1 bomb.”

“There isn’t one on Mars,” Mattie said, “and Con blew up all of hers on Earth.”

“The System set it off.” Ivan should have seen it before, that the System would keep some bombs in reserve.

“Bullshit,” Mattie said. “Not on Mars.”

Mattie did not realize what the System would do to the inner planets in revenge for Earth. He never had. It had always been “us against them” for Mattie and Constance, but no matter how many times Ivan tried to explain it, they had never realized that although there might be a real and tangible “us,” there never was and never had been a solid “them.” Of course the System had bombed Mars.

“We have to go to the Fox and the Hound,” Ivan said.

“If it’s in the fallout zone—”

“It’s not.”

Constance’s old bar was not in the fallout zone, but only barely so. Mattie brought the Copenhagen down only after extracting a promise from Ivan not to linger. The trip to the planet’s surface was familiar, and he had done it so many times before that the shape of the scarp was burned into his brain.

When they had landed, Ivan went out into the high wind without bothering to shield himself from the sand. Mattie followed him at a little distance.

The place where Constance’s bar should have been was nothing but blackened stone. Ivan said, “Did she do this?”

“Yeah,” Mattie said, sounding unexpectedly frustrated.

Ivan should have known this, too, he realized. Constance would burn anything that connected her to her past. She had Milla Ivanov in her ear now, after all, and Milla would tell her that a past was a weakness.

Far off, unnatural clouds loomed and gathered.

The cities of Mars were burned and destroyed and abandoned; the people had fled into the desert, into the tundra. The first few places they went expecting to find people, they found nothing but the dead.

Perhaps the whole planet was dead, Ivan thought, but at last they found a temporary settlement of wary refugees and descended to speak to them. Mattie was looking nervously at the fuel gauge—they were taking off and landing so often that they were burning through even their significant supply—but Ivan didn’t care.

He found a young woman who looked susceptible to charm. “Excuse me,” Ivan said. She looked at him with green eyes that held the same shadowed look that could be seen in the rest of the surviving Martians, that fear of nameless things. Ivan smiled his most charming smile. “I heard a terrible rumor.” He spun his story with such charm and sincerity that he hoped she could not hear the pounding of his heart.

The Huntress was dead, the green-eyed girl told him, but when Ivan moved on to the next people, they told him that the Huntress was alive but an ally of hers had died in her stead; the Huntress was alive, and no one had died; the Huntress had never been to Mars. The confused and contradicting reports spun through Ivan’s head like dust on the Martian wind. Ivan flew from persona to persona, tossing off lies as if he were shedding his clothes, desperate to convince each person they passed that they should tell him everything they knew. The longer they searched, the more Ivan plied his trade in the desperate hope of answers, the quieter Mattie grew, the more strangely he watched Ivan lie.

The rumors took them at last to a town called Isabellon. Ivan and Mattie had learned its name and its location and had flown the Copenhagen to where it should have been, but when they stepped out of their ship, they found only ash and bone, the ruined shells of houses that had been burned and bombed into nothingness. Whatever had happened there, there was no one left alive to tell.

“We’ll go to one of the nearby towns,” Mattie said while Ivan stared down at what once might have been finger bones, lying severed in the Martian dust. “They’ll know what happened.”

They went. “Please,” Ivan said when he found a dark-haired young man with a nose like a hawk’s, and smiled his most charming smile. “I need your help.” There was the same shadow in the young man’s eyes as there had been in the green-eyed girl’s; he, too, had caught a glimpse of the creeping dark, had felt the tip of its chill finger rest its weight on the back of his neck.

Ivan laid his fingers lightly against the front of the man’s chest, over where his heart beat steadily and separate from Ivan’s.

“I just want to know the truth,” Ivan said, as if nothing in this terrible world mattered but him and the dark-haired man, and so the man told him what he had heard. The Wild Hunt had destroyed Isabellon in vengeance for the death of their leader, he said, and darker things: now filled with wild rage, the Wild Hunt would do the same to the rest of the planets; the Mallt-y-Nos had destroyed Isabellon for the joy of seeing something burn; the Mallt-y-Nos had destroyed Isabellon for no reason at all.

“It’s easy for you, isn’t it?” Mattie said strangely as Ivan turned his back on the dark-haired man.

“What is?” Ivan asked, but Mattie did not explain, and Ivan had more pressing things to think about. The people were turning on Constance. If the people in Isabellon hadn’t killed her, Ivan knew, someone else would, and soon. He had to find her if she was not dead already. If she was, he wondered if it was worth sorting through the ash and dust around Isabellon for the bones that once had been hers.

It was in a little refugee town that Ivan nearly gave up.

Mattie was talking to a crowd of people not far away, trying to solicit information from them. The town was not a town, more a collection of landed ships and downed shuttles. Fuel was nearly impossible to find, and so these people had settled where they had landed, huddled together beneath the Martian winds. Steel shuttles glinted dully in disorderly lines.

The people there were not Martians at all but mostly Venereans. When Mattie asked his questions, the only things they could tell him about the Mallt-y-Nos were how dreadful she had been, how dire, how she had come down on Venus and laid it, planet entire, to waste. And so they had fled here.

They had wasted too much time on the Macha, and Ivan knew it. If he had forced his way out—pushed Shara harder—perhaps they could have made it here earlier. He could have saved Constance or joined her. Ivan’s leg ached. Rather than let anyone see his mask shredded and thin, Ivan left Mattie trying to negotiate a trade of supplies, leaving the town to limp out into the desert, where the wind shredded the dirt between the stones unobstructed.

There was radiation on the breeze, Ivan knew. They were near enough to the blast radius that some fallout was inevitable. Not enough to kill him but enough, nearly enough, that his body knew the wound without feeling it.

He turned his face toward the unseen explosion and shut his eyes and imagined he could feel the sickening energy of disintegrating particles as it tore through his flesh.

When he heard the footsteps, he opened his eyes again.

Not Mattie. He would know Mattie’s step anywhere. These feet had a slow and cautious tread across the sand, the careful movement of the injured or the old.

A creeping surreal feeling climbed up Ivan’s spine into the back of his brain, the suspicion that if he turned around, there would be no one there, or something too dreadful for words.

Behind him, the footsteps stopped. Ivan turned.

There was a woman standing on the sand behind him. She was very old, bent over herself as if the sky had a grip around her waist and she was passively bowing away from its upward pull.

The howl of the wind nearly covered up the faint Terran tinge to her accent. “I thought I knew your face.”

“You might,” Ivan said.

“You came here looking for the Huntress.”

“Do you know where she is?”

Out of the shelter of the shuttles, the dust got into Ivan’s nose and eyes. The little old woman came closer, then closer still. When she spoke again, Ivan noticed what he had not noticed before: her teeth were perfectly straight and white, pristine. It was strange for anyone but particularly for a woman of her age. She had certainly been System once.

It no longer mattered, Ivan thought, looking down at the little old woman with the perfect teeth.

“You’ve been to Isabellon.”

“Yes.”

The woman said, “I lived there once.”

Not “that was my town” but only “I lived there,” as if this little old woman no longer lived anymore at all. “You were there.”

“I left before the end. The Mallt-y-Nos gave the order, but one of her generals, Arawn Halley, was the one who burned the city down. Her people killed the Isabellons. She’d shared bread with them once, but her people still killed them.”

“Why did she give the order?”

For a long moment the little old woman did not answer, looking at him with a strange and distant sympathy like the Terran she must once have been.

She said, “The Isabellons had killed one of the Huntress’s followers.”

Constance had always been good at revenge. “So she’s alive,” Ivan said, because that was what mattered, that was all he should think of now. His time trapped on the Macha had not been all a waste. Constance’s life had not been the price for his worthless safety.

“Yes. A different woman died in that town.”

Ivan found himself thinking of those incongruously delicate finger bones he’d seen in the desert.

“My neighbors were angry and afraid,” the little old woman said. “They did something terrible when they killed that woman. It was a mistake.”

If the wind shifted, Ivan thought, the fallout from the bomb so many miles away might be blown all the way here, might deal him a delayed death blow with its solar strength.

“The Huntress tried to save her, but there was nothing to do. She went out willingly to face the crowd to give the Huntress a chance to escape. Her own people had to drag the Mallt-y-Nos away.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I recognized you the moment I saw you,” said the woman, who had not known his face from System broadcasts but because she had recently seen his mother. “I thought it was only right that kin should know when kin had died.”

The rumors that had reached him and Mattie had been not of Constance’s death but of his mother’s. Milla Ivanov had followed her husband and, she must have believed, her son.

“Where is she now?” Ivan asked, his voice so quiet that the wind almost stole his words away.

“Her body is gone,” the woman said. “They scattered her limbs to hide what they had done.”

“Not her,” Ivan said, too harshly. He wanted to shout, but that was to show a weakness he could not afford, not here, where there were people watching. Not anywhere; there were always people watching. “The Mallt-y-Nos. Do you know where she is now?”

“I heard her people talking before my neighbors attacked her. And I know where she decided to take her fleet after.”

“Where is she?”

“Why?” asked the woman. “She has already killed your mother. If you follow her, she’ll kill you as well.”

Ivan said for the third and final time, “Where is the Mallt-y-Nos?”

The little old woman said, “The Mallt-y-Nos is on Europa.”