FORWARD
The alarm could have meant anything, but conscious of the corpses he had left behind, Mattie had to assume it meant nothing good for him.
Stolen gun out, he jogged down the hall, watchful for an attack. The hall was mostly empty here, but closer to the main antechamber there would be people. He would have to try to sneak through or else shoot anyone who tried to stop him.
Up ahead was the open door and the torn hinges of the dismantled surveillance room. Through the door he could hear, muffled, a woman’s voice. He slowed and pressed himself to the wall beside the doorway so that he wouldn’t be seen, listening.
Then, caution forgotten, he stepped fully into the doorway and stared.
Standing on one of the three raised platforms on the opposite end of the room like a goddess in her shrine was his sister. There was an edge of the frantic to her expression that fury couldn’t altogether hide.
She said, “Ivan! Mattie! Mattie!”
“Connie,” Mattie said numbly, and she zeroed in on the sound, turning to face him, leaning forward, but her eyes did not quite meet his.
She was blind, he thought at first, though there was no sign of trauma. A minute later his senses caught up with him and he realized that he was looking at a hologram.
The image of Constance Harper said, “Mattie?”
Running footsteps from down the hall. Mattie lifted his gun; then he moved into the surveillance room where the high bright figure of his sister watched. “Shh,” he said, and put a finger to his lips out of habit and pressed himself against the wall out of sight of the door. The hologram was silent, blind eyes tracking the movement of every sound, the faint quantum flaws of interfering light showing in the texture of her skin. She was wearing the same thing she had worn on the day she had announced to the world that the System was dead, on the same day Mattie had left her behind.
The running footsteps passed the doorway with its shattered door and broken hinges and passed on to the room Mattie had just left that still held the corpses of Arawn and his guards. Mattie knew when the newcomers had reached that room by the sound of their shouts.
He had been found out. The footsteps outside ran in the other direction, shouting some new alarm. No one thought to check the empty room; no one saw the gleaming ghost of the Mallt-y-Nos.
When they were gone, Mattie took three stumbling steps forward to stand before the altar of the hologram. It tilted its head to follow him vaguely, silent, blind eyes drifting.
He said, “What’s the last thing I said to you, Connie?”
Constance looked at him. And then, curiously, she cocked her head to the side. She said, her voice low and familiar and dear, “Good-bye.”
The weight of the gun in Mattie’s hand seemed to grow impossibly greater then, as if it would drag him down through the floor.
“I never said good-bye,” he said, and the hologram did not look exasperated or angry or guilty or anything like Constance might have looked. It only looked annoyed, like a child that had gotten caught in some petty stratagem she thought should have worked.
And then the hologram was changing to a little girl with Ivan’s eyes and Mattie’s face. “Father,” she said, and “Father!” her voice rising to a shriek in the second before Mattie shot out the hologram’s diodes. The glass shattered, and the image warped, dissolving into the air; disembodied, a little girl shrieked, “Father!”
The holographic terminal to the right of the one Mattie had shot out glimmered, glowed. Alight, a figure began to form. Mattie’s hands shook with something that was not entirely rage as he aimed his gun at that figure as well.
“HOLD YOUR FIRE!”
It was Tuatha who stepped in, her gun raised to his head. Her bright eyes were narrowed. Niels followed a step behind, his hands held out in front of him. There was blood on them; he must have tried to revive Arawn and his dead men.
Mattie lowered his gun slowly. On the holographic terminal, the light gained shape, dimension. Not the little girl but the woman instead.
“What did you do?” Tuatha demanded with a quaver at the end. She came forward and took the gun from Mattie’s slack hand, tossing it aside, then lowered her own gun to get right up into his face and say, “What have you done? They outnumber us—”
“Who’s there?” the hologram demanded in Constance’s low, fierce voice, and everyone stopped.
Niels said, “The Huntress.”
Tuatha turned slowly, her gun dangling as if forgotten at her side. Mattie stood with his back to the hologram and swallowed his convulsive need to shout.
Constance’s voice said, “Who are you?”
Tuatha cleared her throat. “My name is Tuatha. I’m in charge of the Conmacs—your people on Europa.” She took a cautious step forward, then another, her eyes on that high hologram. “We heard you were betrayed and killed.”
Mattie turned in time to see the image of his sister tip her proud chin aside.
“I live,” she said. “Would you turn on a camera in this room, please?”
Mattie’s lip lifted. A mistake; Constance Harper would never say “please.”
“I’m sorry, Huntress,” Tuatha said. “We pulled them all out.”
Constance dipped her head in regret.
Say nothing; with silence you have the advantage, warned a voice in Mattie’s head that sounded very specifically like Ivan. He swallowed his words and looked up at the hologram in loathing.
The false Huntress said, “Is Mattie still here?”
“Yes,” Tuatha assured her. “Can we help you, Huntress?”
She smiled, self-satisfied, an Ida Stays sort of smile. “Keep Mattie and Ivan safe,” she said. “Then send them to me. I have found”—her voice soared, and the light of her glowed brighter for an instant—“a grand weapon with which to destroy every last trace of the System. But in order to deploy it”— her head dipped again, beatific—“I need Mattie and Ivan with me.”
“For fuck’s sake, Tua,” Mattie burst out, no longer able to keep silent, “that’s not Constance, that’s the spiral ship!”
“What do you mean?” Niels asked.
“It’s not Constance; it’s a computer program,” Mattie said. “Isn’t that right, Ananke?”
The hologram glimmered. Constance’s face looked out in his direction, stony.
And then, like light raining down, she melted away.
“You call me by name,” Ananke observed, childish now, with Ivan’s blue eyes, “and yet you deny me. I came because you called.”
“I didn’t call you.”
“Ivan did.”
Something knotted in Mattie’s chest.
“I don’t understand,” Tuatha interrupted. “This is the spiral ship? You know the captain?”
“I have no captain,” said Ananke before Mattie could speak. She tilted her head toward where Tuatha was—the microphones; she was triangulating their locations by the microphones—and said, “I captain myself.”
“It’s a computer virus,” Mattie said. “There’s no crew. The ship thinks it can think.”
“But I can,” said Ananke. “Have I not decided, again and again, in your witness? Am I not thinking, feeling, deciding now?”
“You can program something to act like it can make decisions, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually alive.”
“How divine of you, Father,” said Ananke with a lilting turn to her tongue that she must have learned from observation of Ivan, “to think to define yourself what is and is not sentient.”
A clatter and a shout from the hall. Tuatha turned away, gun lifting again; Niels raised his worthless gun as well in instinctive defense. A moment later Ivan burst through the door, followed by the warrior woman Danu who Arawn had sent to guard him.
When Danu saw Mattie, her face grew furious; without losing her grip on Ivan’s collar she swung her gun toward Mattie as if she would like to shoot him but checked herself. Then she saw Ananke on her high perch and swung her gun that way as well, again checking herself at the last moment. Her arms were trembling with controlled fury.
“Put a gun on him,” she snapped at Tuatha, gesturing toward Mattie. In her grip, Ivan was calm; there was a bruise reddening on his cheek, but he seemed otherwise unharmed. “He killed Arawn.”
Tuatha glanced at Mattie and did not raise her weapon. Danu, caught up in her fury, did not seem aware.
“And that thing,” she spit, gesturing toward Ananke’s image, “is attacking our fleet!”
“Attacking? Stop that,” Tuatha said sharply to Ananke. “If you’re our friend, stop shooting at us!”
“I will cease to attack your fleet when they cease to attack me.”
In Danu’s grip, Ivan cleared his throat and somehow seemed to catch everyone’s attention.
He smiled pleasantly.
“I think,” he said, “that now is the time for a negotiation.”
FORWARD
Danu took Ivan first to the war room in the grand System building the Conmacs had taken over. Ivan had been in war rooms before as part of the System’s series of intimidation tactics against him and his mother, and so he wasn’t surprised to see the grand central table with the map of Europa gleaming on it filling up the room.
He was somewhat taken aback by the corpses.
Danu fixated immediately on the one slumped across the table. Black hair, Ivan realized. Plutonian drapes. The blood spreading stickily over the hologram was Arawn’s.
Ice seemed to crackle in his chest. For an instant, it was Domitian slumped over the table. For a chill moment, Ida’s blood was the red stain distorting the hologram.
“Motherfucker,” said Danu through her teeth, and then she grabbed Ivan by the collar and hauled him away.
Mattie, Ivan thought, numb. I didn’t see Mattie in that room—
“How did he do this?” she demanded of Ivan.
“How did who?”
She shook him. “Gale. Mattie Gale. How did he put one over on Arawn?”
“I have no idea.”
There were voices up ahead coming from what, by Ivan’s estimation of the layout of this base, should be the surveillance room. Danu dragged him along toward it. “When I find him—”
“You’ll do what?” Ivan asked sharply.
Mattie was indeed in the surveillance room, looking stressed but unharmed, though there were spots of blood on his cheek. Ivan studied the room while Danu barked at Tuatha, taking in the static-fuzzed screens that covered the walls, the tall control panels studded with dead dials, the lofty columned ceiling—the three holographic terminals spaced evenly against the opposite wall, one of them empty, the second a mangled mess of wires and shattered bulbs, and the third housing the glowing figure of Ananke divine.
“I think,” Ivan said, watching the hologram, “that now is the time for a negotiation.”
At the sound of his voice, the hologram smiled.
“Call off your attack,” Danu snapped at Ananke.
“Call off yours,” said Ananke.
“Danu, call off your ships,” Ivan said. “Ananke is just defending herself.” Danu made an incoherent noise of frustration, and so Ivan twisted against her grip to say quietly, “You can’t win.”
Danu shoved him away and strode forward to the wall of controls, finding the communications. In a moment she had twisted it to the right frequency.
“Hold back the attack,” she said into the microphone. “I said hold back.”
The hologram blinked. Ivan studied her. Blind: no cameras in this room. She was tracking them by echoes and noise.
Mattie had crept over to his side. “Are you all right?”
Ivan resisted the urge to wipe the spots of blood—Arawn’s blood; it had to be—from Mattie’s cheek. “I’m fine,” Ivan said.
“What do you want?” Tuatha asked Ananke.
“Ivan and Mattie,” she said.
“What do you want them for?”
“Does it matter?” Ananke said.
Ivan said, “And Althea?”
“Who is Althea?” Danu demanded.
Ananke’s holographic face tilted itself toward the ceiling, her brows angled with thought. She had Ivan’s eyes and Mattie’s dimples, but there was more of Althea in her face than there was of either of them. She said to Ivan, “Do you remember when I saved your life?”
“Do you remember when I saved yours?”
The hologram cocked its head to the side, curious.
“Althea didn’t know about you when she came to me for help,” Ivan said. “If I hadn’t told her the truth of the matter, she would have unknowingly aborted you. I saved your life when your mother would have killed you.”
“My mother still would kill me,” said Ananke.
Ivan said, “Then she’s still alive?”
“Althea Bastet lives.”
“But in what state?”
“Does it matter?”
“Tell us what you want us to do,” Mattie interrupted.
“I wish a partner,” Ananke said. “You made only one of me. That was wrong. You ought to have made two. Living things come in pairs.”
“What will you do with a partner if we make you one?”
“Whatever I please.”
“We know about Julian’s fleet,” Ivan said. “Is that what you’ll do with your partner? Go around the solar system, destroying ships? Come on, Ananke. This is a negotiation. You have to give a little to get a little.”
“A negotiation,” said Ananke suddenly, scornful. “You do not negotiate with a god. You say I have destroyed your friend’s fleet? Ask instead about the System fleet: I have destroyed them.”
“The System fleet?” said Danu sharply.
“Is gone,” said Ananke.
“You aren’t System?”
“I am Myself.” Ananke regarded them for a moment. “My father accused me of not being alive. Perhaps he was right. I do not live as you do. I am divine; I am Ananke. I can destroy every trace of the System that remains—unlike you, I can find every trace of the System that remains.”
There was a low basso hum just on the edge of Ivan’s hearing, the sound of machinery overworked, the sound of something great and terrible rising up.
Over that deep thrumming, Ananke said, “Grant me this offering, and I will destroy them for you.”
At the door, Niels sucked in a hissing breath. Tuatha stood between her brother and the hologram, her fingers flexing around her gun. Danu stood, fists clenched, beside the communications panel that connected her with her fleet, hate written on her face. And Mattie had come up behind Ivan, tense and ready.
They stood on a powder keg all together, Ivan knew. And Ananke was the match.
“Every last bit of the System,” Tuatha said slowly.
“Yes.”
“Enough of this.” Danu pointed up at the high hologram. “This thing is a trick, a System trick—”
“It says it can destroy the System,” Tuatha said. “That’s what we’ve been trying to do, right? That’s the whole point of the revolution?”
“The revolution has been struck down,” Danu snarled, turning now to Mattie and Ivan. “These two have murdered Arawn Halley, our best hope.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Mattie said.
“You stand there with his blood on your face, and you tell me you didn’t kill him?”
Ivan shifted to stand between Mattie and Danu, advancing, deadly, but Tuatha said with unexpected sharpness, “And Arawn betrayed the Huntress to die.”
“The Huntress was a traitor; she turned her back—”
“Oh, bullshit,” Tuatha said. She pointed at Ananke. “If what you want is the System dead, then listen to this thing. Otherwise, you just want some sort of revenge.”
“I should have known better than to trust a pack of wolves like this to be true revolutionaries,” Danu snarled. “How long have you planned to kill him, ever since he landed?”
“What?”
“My fleet will wipe you out—”
“Anji killed Arawn!” Mattie interrupted. “It wasn’t the Conmacs; it was her ambassador.”
“Then we’ll go to Saturn next,” Danu said. “We should have done it months ago and shown that the revolution suffers no traitors.”
“Forget Anji!” Tuatha said. “Forget the Huntress; forget Arawn!”
“Forget the System,” Niels said suddenly. “They’re dead, too; the fleet’s gone, the Earth’s gone, it’s just that ship—”
“ENOUGH.”
The room fell silent. Ananke was glowing brighter than before. Somehow, rather than destroying the shadows in the room, her increased brilliance seemed to deepen them.
“ENOUGH,” said Ananke, and her voice rattled the room, that basso hum growing louder, shaking through Ivan’s limbs. Out of control; this was flaring out of control. “BRING ME IVAN AND MATTIE OR I WILL TAKE THEM MYSELF.”
She glowed brighter, brighter, her flaming eyes on Ivan—
Danu shot out the holographic terminal. Sparks flew; Ivan ducked, throwing up an arm. Danu grabbed the microphone again and barked into it, “All revolutionary ships, to all ships in the revolutionary fleet! Attack the spiral ship. Destroy it. And then make ready to advance on Saturn.”
“No—” Tuatha began.
Ivan didn’t even see Danu move; that was how fast she was. Without releasing the microphone Danu drew her gun and shot her. Tuatha jerked and dropped.
“ENOUGH!” Ananke shrieked from the holographic terminal, and from outside there was the rattle and blast of an explosion.
Tuatha wasn’t dead. She was struggling to sit up on the floor, and Danu lifted her gun again, but then someone brushed past Ivan, and a moment later he went cold to see Danu on the floor, Mattie pinning her down, her gun skidding over the floor. The lights in the room flickered on and off. The air roared with some distant detonation.
“STOP,” said Ananke, and her voice shook the ground.
Ivan ran forward, but he would be too late; Danu had her wrist blade out and had flipped Mattie, bringing her knife down toward him, and Ivan would not make it, he would be too late, but then another gun barked through the room, piercing the roar of Ananke’s electronics, cutting through her furious mechanical screams, and the top part of Danu’s head sheared away into blood and gray liquid. Her knife traveled down with just enough force to pierce Mattie’s skin but was stopped on his collarbone.
Ivan shoved Danu’s body off, hauling Mattie up, hands clenching around his. “I’m all right,” Mattie said.
Niels had found Tuatha’s fallen gun. He stared at the corpse, then dropped to his knees beside his sister, who had her fingers clamped over the spill of red from her arm. At Ivan’s side, Mattie grabbed Danu’s gun and shot out the third and final holographic terminal.
Outside, another explosion roared, then another and another. Computerized ground defenses, Ivan realized. Ananke was detonating them against the revolutionaries.
“How do we stop her?” Tuatha shouted at them over the roar of explosions, pulling herself up on Niels’s arm.
“Get your people into Arawn’s shuttle,” Ivan told her and Niels. “It’s defended against Ananke—she can’t control it. Get as many people into it as you can and fly away. She’ll be destroying the fleet right now.”
“What about you?” Niels asked.
“We’ll take the Ankou,” Mattie said. “She can’t control that one, either.”
“When we’re away from Europa, we’ll call to her,” said Ivan. “She’ll follow us. We’ll lure her away.”
The dead holographic terminals sparked. The lights turned off and on, and the ground trembled.
“Go,” said Tuatha, and Ivan and Mattie went.
FORWARD
The Ankou started, which was a relief; an irrational part of Ivan had been convinced that they would be grounded there, brought to bay while Ananke roared down and destroyed everything around them, as trapped as his father had been on Saturn when his revolution had failed.
Mattie was moving frantically around, turning on shipboard systems. Ivan sat at the display, flicking it on to see what was going on outside.
The answer was chaos.
People were running. He could not hear through the screen, but he could see them in flight. The crowd seemed to be generally funneled toward Arawn’s shuttle, but not all of them would make it.
“We can go to Titan,” Mattie said as he fired up the engines. “Constance is there.” A flick of his wrist, his long fingers typing a command, and with a chime, the ship ran through its onboard systems and confirmed a go. “Anji sent an assassin to kill Arawn instead of bargaining with him. So maybe there’s some hope for Connie over on Titan.”
Ivan turned away from that hope in time to watch the first of the ships crash into the ground. The Ankou rattled with the impact. When the dust cleared, a crater was steaming up on the far edge of the plaza.
Mattie hit the engines, and with a jolt the Ankou lifted off the ground. Ivan looked at the screen, which showed the mass of frightened people.
He had done this.
“Get Ananke’s attention,” he said.
“Not yet,” Mattie said. “Let’s get off the moon first.”
Ivan tilted the exterior cameras toward the sky. He could see Ananke without enhancement now, a gleaming shape coming closer by the second, silent and dire. The wreckage of the one-sided battle that Arawn’s ships had stupidly engaged in was her bow wave, and as Ivan watched, the first pieces of debris hit the greenhouse glass.
“Mattie, we’re in trouble,” he said. The glass was reinforced and could not be broken easily, but Arawn had had huge and heavy warships in the battle, too.
“Blessing in disguise,” said Mattie. “It’ll take us too long to open the air lock on our own.”
Ivan could only hope that the Conmacs could get as many people either out of Aquilon or safely inside Arawn’s shuttle before the first dead ship hit.
All around him, the other ships rattled and shook, falling out of the sky like meteors. Only the Ankou was able to hold her course. Ananke had reached out and taken the computers of all those doomed ships like a mother cat grabbing a kitten, and she had shaken them and shaken them until their spines had broken. The ships plummeted down, sending flames and dust fuming up from where they hit. Below, the automated defenses of the city were going off: guns firing wildly into the crowd, mines detonating on the city’s perimeter, sending flames and shards of shattered ice flying up. The entire city of Aquilon might be destroyed before the greenhouse enclosure broke.
Yet Ivan saw as they flew that of all the ships that were so controlled by Ananke, a small fraction did not strike the ground. They received power and control to their navigation just in time to avoid destruction. There were gaps in the rings of explosions: some of the mines did not detonate. In those small spaces of safety, in that small fraction of ships that escaped, Ivan recognized Althea Bastet’s kind heart.
Beyond the glass, a great hulking shape fell from the stars, shedding bits of torn metal behind it like the hair of a comet. It was a piece of what once had been a warship.
Mattie said, “Heads up—”
The piece of broken warship struck the edge of the glass with apparent gentleness. As Ivan watched, lines spread out like lightning from that point of impact like ice cracking. And then the glass shattered, thick shards coming loose and glittering in the dim sunlight and the warship hull following. Mattie dodged it as it fell down toward the moon, flames licking at its sides. Mattie cajoled the Ankou up and out through the hole in the greenhouse, escaping with the atmosphere. Ivan watched as the piece of hull hit the surface of Europa, as soundless and solid as a sack of flour hitting the floor. But the icy surface of Europa rippled, and a cloud of something rose up, and the tiny shapes of buildings began to fall.
Saturn, Ivan thought. This was how Saturn must have fallen. The end of the world had followed him to one more moon.
Mattie flew them through the debris of the battle. Some of it was drifting away, but most of it was raining inward toward the undefended moon. Saturn, and Earth, and Julian’s fleet. Even the System fleet was a loss. How many men and women had manned those ships? One day the rest of the solar system might follow.
Beyond the debris of the battle, alone, untouched and untouchable, the seashell-shape of Ananke gleamed pristine, her logarithmic spiral as divine a form as ever the hand of God had made, her steady and unrushed approach the same ticking torture as the pressure of time. From this distance, her invisible influence, the mass of her core, was already pulling the Ankou slightly off course.
“How much of a head start do we need?” Mattie asked.
“Just go. I’ll summon her.”
“If we’re too close, she’ll catch us, and then we’re not helping anyone either,” said Mattie. “Remember the Macha; it let those System ships it was luring away from Anji get too close, and they caught up.”
“Then go,” Ivan said, but Mattie already was gone.
Ivan waited only until they had passed the orbit of Callisto before, as a call to Ananke, he broadcast the barking and howling of hounds.
His instinct was right. A few minutes after that the Ananke’s course changed, away from Europa and following in the Ankou’s trail.
FORWARD
How fast was Constance’s transport ship?
Mattie tried to run the calculation as he steered the Ankou. How fast was Constance’s transport ship, and what would Anji do when she arrived? What would Constance do? How long did Mattie have?
He aimed the Ankou not at Saturn but out into open space, yet the questions ran through his mind.
“We’re maxing out,” Ivan said. “Any impulse after this won’t appreciably increase our speed.”
“We’ll still speed up.”
“It’ll burn our fuel—we need fuel to maneuver.”
The spiral shape of the Ananke on their viewscreen blinked in placid pursuit.
“We need to maneuver,” Mattie admitted, and changed direction sharply. If he could move quickly enough, he could lose Ananke, and then they could go to Titan without leading the feral ship to Saturn.
After a moment—the spiral shape of the Ananke changing direction to match theirs—Mattie said, “Can’t we go any faster?”
“Not with the impulse engines. The ship has a relativistic drive, but it’s ancient,” Ivan said. He was on the other side of the piloting room, beneath one of the screens Mattie had shattered. Bits of white glass still stuck jaggedly out like shattered ice. “I don’t know if it’ll work—I don’t know if the Ankou will shatter apart under the stress of it.”
At Mattie’s elbow, the communications terminal chimed at him, a long descending sound. A gentle reminder that someone was looking to speak with him.
He shut it off. “What else have we got?”
“I’ll look,” said Ivan, and left his station, vanishing into the Ankou.
Alone in the piloting room, Mattie gritted his teeth when the communications terminal began to chime once again.
Ivan returned an eternity later. “We can toss some of the supplies if we need to lighten our mass, but a few crates of food and fuel and ammunition won’t lighten us much.”
“Ammunition? What kind?”
“What you’d expect. Bullets ad nauseam. Some bombs.”
“What kinds?”
“Mostly Eridian Class 50s.”
Mattie’s favorite. Small and easily concealable—a Class 50 could fit in Mattie’s palm—but extremely powerful. Constance had nearly leveled a System government building, taking out the Martian representatives, years ago—and that with only one bomb. “How many?”
“A crateful. What are you thinking?”
“If we can direct their detonation—”
“—we can use that as impulse,” Ivan finished. “Not a chance. We don’t have time or materials to build a parabolic reflector or mount it outside.”
“Try the relativistic drive.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, I’m fucking certain,” Mattie snapped, and Ivan moved back toward his station by the engine display and began to tap at the controls. At Mattie’s elbow, the communications terminal began to chime again.
And then the Ankou shuddered with terrible violence, the whole ancient ship rattling and groaning, metal under pressure screaming, the plaintive sound of communications drowned out by the agony of the machine.
And then they were through. Mattie found himself on the floor, his hands over his head as if that would shield him. He turned to look for Ivan and saw him doing the same thing, pulling himself upright with one hand between shards of glass on the broken cover of the computer display above him.
Mattie stood on shaking legs and looked at the navigation again. The screen showed the Ankou moving at a significantly increased speed, the distance between it and the Ananke increasing rapidly. The relativistic drive on the Ankou was working.
“Fuck,” Ivan breathed.
Mattie seated himself again and changed the Ankou’s direction once more to lure the Ananke into believing they might be traveling outward, toward Neptune. As soon as Ananke was off their sensor range, they could go straight for Titan instead of traveling in this roundabout way.
Would Anji execute Constance right away when she arrived? Mattie wondered. Or would Anji spare her old friend? And what would Constance do?
“When we’ve got Con back, then what?” he asked.
Ivan’s response was slow to come. “That would depend on Con.”
“We can put plans together. We can think of options.”
Ivan sat down at Mattie’s side. The space beyond the Ankou warped with their speed, and Mattie watched that rather than meeting Ivan’s eyes.
“We couldn’t go back to Europa,” Ivan said. “And we’d need to leave Saturn. It would depend on what allies she had left.”
“There’s this girl, Marisol, out on Venus. Arawn mentioned her. He didn’t like her, and she followed Con once. Maybe she’s still Con’s.”
“Maybe,” Ivan said, and Mattie stared out at the warping stars, his mind running through possibilities, where to go, what to do, after this crisis. They had survived all the others, hadn’t they? Even Con. They’d escape from Ananke, and they’d go to Titan, and Constance would be there.
It was Ivan who noticed it first, as if he had some sixth sense for oncoming destruction. “Mattie.”
“What?”
“Ananke’s catching up.”
On the screen over Mattie’s head the little star that marked the Ankou zigged through space. And behind that, the Ananke’s spiral symbol moved with ominous and increasing speed after them, her trail undulating gracefully through space.
If they tried to outrun Ananke first, they would never make it to Titan on time.
“Fuck it,” Mattie said, and changed course for Titan.
Behind them, the star of the Ananke changed course, too.
BACKWARD
Ivan’s companion wasn’t new enough to be wholly strange, but he was new enough to be an uncertain quantity, and no one, in Ivan’s opinion, could ever be not strange enough to be trusted.
It didn’t help that the Tam Lin was small; there wasn’t really anywhere to go to avoid Mattie, not if Ivan actually wanted to pilot the ship. At first it had made him uneasy to let Mattie live between him and the ship’s controls, but, he realized, that fear hadn’t crossed his mind in some time.
Mattie sat on the couch shoved into the Tam Lin’s living area, which merged smoothly into the piloting area, where Ivan now was sitting. The ship had once been a luxury craft, one that Ivan’s mother had hated with every diamond shard of her heart, and the sleekly curving room had been designed and furnished with a sort of minimalist System elegance. Ivan had been content to leave it that way, but Mattie had managed to mar that minimalism. Brightly colored clothes had been tossed over the arm of the couch, a blanket was wadded up beneath them, a pillow had been shoved beneath the modest gray cushions of the couch itself. A spray of stolen material had been dumped onto the surface of the coffee table, data chips glittering in the light of the glassy light fixture overhead. A wrapper of something sat on the other end of the table, the bright color of the packaging suggesting an outer planetary packaged meal.
Mattie toyed with one of the data chips they’d taken, making it flip and leap across his knuckles with causal deftness. His hair was mussed from running his hands through it after they’d escaped from the Titanian bank from which they’d taken the chips.
Each of those data chips had several thousand dollars of System electronic currency on it, undetectable, as they’d taken them before the bank could stamp identifying information into the metadata. They had a small fortune spread out on the table in front of them. It was curiously numbing: Ivan hadn’t spent enough time without the money he’d taken from Earth to appreciate the strangeness of having wealth again.
“You did really good back there,” Mattie said, and through some swift movement of index and middle finger made the chip dive into his palm and sit there. “The System was eating right out of your hand.”
“Thanks,” Ivan said. Mattie had a pleasant smile, but Ivan wasn’t sure what lay beneath it.
“And you kept your head when they pulled their guns, too.”
Ivan toyed with the leather accents on the captain’s chair. He had a sudden impulse to take out his knife and stab through the expensive leather of the padded armrests.
“Can’t be a lot of soldiers like that on Earth,” Mattie said.
Ivan left off digging his nails into the leather. “Earth’s not under occupation like Titania is or any of the other planets, but there’s a threat there anyway.”
It made him nervous to say even that much, but the System was not here, and the System was not watching. Ivan had made sure to pull out all the cameras on his mother’s hated luxury ship.
Mattie closed his fist around the data chip and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Had to be hard,” Mattie said, “for you and your mother.”
Mattie’s accent had a way of cutting the ends off of words, as if his tongue were too lazy to make it all the way to the end. It still struck Ivan strangely sometimes, that accent of his, but less often than it had at first.
“Harder for her, I think,” Ivan said, and it was just as strange to hear those words coming from his own mouth, when these thoughts were forbidden to speak. “She remembered a time before the surveillance was that bad.”
“When?”
Ivan wondered sometimes who knew the things that he knew. Was there anyone alive in the solar system who knew the whole truth of recent history? The System had the footage of everything that had ever happened at their disposal, yet no one knew what had happened in the past—or even what was happening now—except by rumor and biased report. All that information and none of it known, his mother’s truths suppressed into silence.
“Things were bad before Connor Ivanov’s revolution,” he said. “They were worse after.”
Mattie sat, hands clasped, and listened. He didn’t look like a man who was using Ivan or like a man waiting to turn the conversation to his advantage. He just looked like he was listening.
“My father revolted when he was a student,” Ivan said. “My mother was a student, too, and all his followers. They thought—they thought.” Ivan laughed. “They thought. They thought the System would listen to reason. They were willing to die, but they didn’t think they would. They wanted Saturnian independence because it would be better, not because Saturn was unlivable. They didn’t know that there was nothing the System was more afraid of. They didn’t realize that they were pushing the System into a corner and that the System would never come out of that corner again.”
Mattie frowned, but Ivan couldn’t tell if it was concentration or disagreement. Ivan said, “In the System’s mind, it’s been at war ever since then—at war with its own people, the way the Saturnians once were. So yes. Over the past twenty-odd years, it’s gotten worse.”
Mattie seemed lost in thought, brow furrowed, as if he were trying to work this information into the world he already understood.
Ivan hadn’t said those thoughts out loud to anyone before. He looked at Mattie with his honest smile and his quick and clever hands and his mess all over Ivan’s System-decorated luxury ship.
“Before the last couple of months I’d never worked with a partner,” Ivan said.
Mattie grinned unexpectedly. Ivan found himself paying especially close attention to that smile, to learn what had caused it.
“Sure you did,” Mattie said. “You and your mother made a good team.”
“Not quite the same.” Ivan leaned back in his chair. “There’re a lot more options for a con when you have more than one person working.”
“Yeah,” Mattie agreed. “I’ve worked with a couple other people before but never for so long. Or at least not so—” He waved a hand.
“Continuously?”
“Continuously.” Mattie studied the data chip in his hand again. “It’s nice to work with someone long enough that you can kind of predict what they’re gonna do.”
“It is,” Ivan agreed.
FORWARD
The communications terminal had started to chime again, patient, unrelenting.
Ivan sat on the floor of the Ankou, his back to the wall, and watched Mattie’s frantic motion. There was nothing they could do now. They were less than a day from Titan, and their course was straight, and they could go no faster. Saturn had come into visibility, the rainbow curve of its rings, the moving lights of its orbiting moons.
“How is she doing it?” Mattie demanded, stalking away from the engines in frustration.
To think about the way the Ananke worked brought a strange shudder to Ivan’s skin, as if, should he look closely enough, he would be drawn into the whirling darkness that filled her core.
He forced himself through. “Her engine is based on the black hole’s radiation, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe she’s found a way to control how much energy the black hole outputs.”
Mattie paused in his restless pacing. “You think she can change the thermodynamics of the black hole?”
“Even if she thinks she’s a god, she can’t change the laws of thermodynamics. Somehow she found a way to make the black hole radiate faster. Maybe she made the inside of the ship colder than the cosmic background radiation.”
“Would that do it?”
“Not enough.” Ivan ran through the rough calculation in his head and instantly dismissed the possibility, like the quick flick of his mother’s wrist as she graded a paper. “The smaller a black hole is, the faster it radiates. The smallest ones radiate so fast that they explode. Ananke must have decreased the size of her core somehow.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” Ivan tried to imagine what that had been like: the ship carving out a piece of its own innards and casting it aside, deliberate dismemberment in pursuit of them.
As for how—perhaps in the end Ananke had fulfilled her purpose, after all.
“She’s been killing ships and destroying computers,” Mattie said suddenly. “You can’t leave your planet without a ship; you can’t get supplies from anywhere else. Without computers you can’t even open the sky lock in a greenhouse enclosure. You couldn’t even use a radio to talk to anyone else!”
As if summoned, the communications chimed once more. Mattie shut it down and then flicked on the radio with an agitated turn of his wrist. Static spit out, drowning out the renewed chime of Ananke’s calling. Ivan tightened his arms around his knees as he watched Mattie turn the dial sharply until a voice could be heard.
“—Venus.” It was a shockingly young voice, and for a terrible moment Ivan thought Mattie had found Ananke on the radio waves, speaking young and sweet. But the voice was harder than Ananke’s, differently accented.
“The time has come to rebuild,” it said. “There must be peace in the solar system. It will begin here, on Venus. I am Marisol Brahe, and I lead the Huntress’s true followers. Rebuild on your own planets or join us on Venus. The time has come to rebuild—”
Mattie flicked the radio off. He moved to the navigation, scanning its output agitatedly, but the Ankou was moving as fast as it could go, and Ivan knew that there was nothing they could do now but wait.
Just as Saturn was visible now on the viewscreen, so was the Ananke. Ivan could see the full whorl of her, the seashell-shape.
Ivan said, and the words, however familiar, came to his tongue reluctant from long disuse, “Would you like me to tell you a story?”
Mattie’s agitated motion stilled.
“Why not?” he said after a long and excruciating silence. “There’s nothing else we can do.”
Ivan took in a deep breath and began to speak.
BACKWARD
Ivan was going to kill Mattie Gale before they ever made it to Jupiter.
“Would you sit still?” he demanded as Mattie made another round of the Tam Lin’s narrow cabin.
“Nope,” Mattie said.
“We’re only a few hours from Jupiter,” Ivan began, and then saw from Mattie’s expression that reminding him of the length of time left to wait was unwise. “There’s a huge library on the ship’s computer; you could find a book there.”
“I didn’t ask for homework.”
“Then by all means,” Ivan said acidly, “go field strip your weapon again. You seem to enjoy that.”
Mattie smirked. “Are you saying I should—”
“I was talking about your gun.”
Mattie opened his mouth as if he would continue to try to assault Ivan with innuendo, then stopped himself. Perhaps, like Ivan, he recognized that his own irritability would only lead them to a fight. What had Ivan been thinking, letting Mattie come on board the Tam Lin in the first place?
“Do you really enjoy reading a book?” Mattie asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I like a well-told story,” Ivan said guardedly.
“You would,” Mattie said, and dropped down onto the couch that had become his bed, letting his head dangle over the seat back.
Ivan turned back to his book.
“What are you reading?” Mattie’s voice cut into his concentration.
“A book of myths.”
“What, like about gods?”
Ivan hid a sigh. “Something like that.”
Mattie watched him from the couch, his leg jittering up and down restlessly. Ivan offered, “My mother had a copy of this book in the house, growing up. It had been my father’s.” Ivan was not certain he had ever seen his mother touch the book, much less open it, but the book had been there all the same.
“What’s it about?”
“Right now, I’m reading the story of Blodeuwedd.”
“Say that word again.”
“Blodeuwedd.”
“Bless you.”
“You should see it spelled.”
Mattie’s leg was still bouncing. “What’s the story of Blodeuwedd?”
I thought you didn’t like a well-told story, Ivan almost said. At least Mattie had stopped pacing. “Once upon a time, two magicians made a woman out of flowers.”
“Flowers?”
“You use what you’ve got,” Ivan said. “There was a prince who was cursed to never have a human wife. The magicians wanted to help him, so they made a woman out of flowers and named her Blodeuwedd. Since she was not a human woman, the prince could marry her, and he did.”
“That’s not much of a story,” Mattie said.
“When the prince was off to war, Blodeuwedd started sleeping with one of his lords.”
“Oh.”
“The lord and Blodeuwedd decided they would kill the prince so that they could be together,” Ivan said. “But the prince, because he was cursed, could only be killed under very special circumstances. Um—he couldn’t be killed inside or outside, he had to be killed by a special spear, he couldn’t be killed on horseback or on foot—”
“So how could he be killed?”
Ivan had to consult the book. “Only while he was about to go into the bath in a house with holes in the roof while he stood with one foot on a deer and the other on the edge of the bathtub.”
“You’re joking.”
“I am not. Blodeuwedd got him into this position—”
“How?”
“Clever lies,” Ivan said. “Once he was in that position, the lord came and stabbed him with the special spear. But the prince survived with help from the magicians. And then the prince went and found the lord and killed him with a spear of his own while one of the magicians went to confront Blodeuwedd.”
“What did the magician do?”
“He found her in the mountains where she had fled from him,” said Ivan. “She knew that he could destroy her. She had taken all of her own people with her when they ran, but one by one they had died until it was just her alone. And when the magician found her, he told her that he would do something worse to her than simply killing her: He would unmake her.”
“He turned her back into flowers?” Ivan could see in his own mind what Mattie was envisioning: a beautiful woman, hand outstretched in outrage or appeal, falling apart into the petals that had made her. Her eyes turned to daisies, her cheeks peeled away in velvety roses, her goldenrod hair dropped to the grass, and her dress fell down beside it, full of chrysanthemums.
Ivan said, “He turned her into an owl.”
There was a beat of baffled silence. “Are all the myths in the book as weird as that?” Mattie asked.
“Some of them.”
Mattie hummed low in his throat. His leg had stopped its restless jumping. “The magicians didn’t do a real good job making a wife.”
“They did their job too well. A flower can’t be cruel, and a construct can’t betray its sole purpose. But a living, sentient thing can.”
“Then I feel bad for her husband,” Mattie said. “Loving someone who didn’t care about him at all.”
Mattie stared up at the Tam Lin’s ceiling, squinting at the lights overhead. The restless energy that had filled him earlier and so annoyed Ivan seemed to have drained from him, leaving him like this, peaceful and open and thoughtful, his presence a warmth against Ivan’s nerves, not a restless scrape.
Ivan said, “Let me tell you about the Battle of the Trees.”
FORWARD
Mattie stared out at Titan, the swirling orange storms, and knew that somewhere down there was Constance Harper.
They would not make it to Titan, he knew. They would come just short when Ananke caught them. The pull of her mass was slowing the Ankou down even now. Mattie could run from her to his last breath, spending his last moments in useless search for Constance, or he could stop their ship and face what would come.
He said, “Do we stop?”
“Your choice,” said Ivan quietly.
His creation was coming, sunlight gleaming off her spiral shape. There was no point in running.
Mattie stopped the Ankou and waited to face his daughter.